New Westheimer Fellows and a New Westheimer Fellowship

Beginning this year, LBI is offering a new research fellowship. The Gerald Westheimer Graduate Fellowship will provide financial assistance up to $3,000 to students enrolled in a Ph.D. program whose projects are connected to the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry.

The LBI also awarded two Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowships, which provide support to scholars who have completed their doctoral degree but have not yet received tenure at an academic institution:

Rebekka Grossmann is Assistant Professor of Migration History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her project examines how forced migration influenced the development of a humanist aesthetics in photography after World War II.

"Photography plays a major role in the shaping of opinions. In its ability to move and elicit emotions, it has fostered the creation of international discourses of solidarity. The post-war world saw a new thirst for messages of humanitarian responsibility amidst the Cold War and episodes of decolonization. However, while the relationship between visual arts and the creation of post-war humanitarian tropes has begun to be acknowledged, the fact that many of these tropes were rooted in displacement and exile remains unseen. In this project, I will follow the routes of refugee artists and journalists, many of whom were Jews trained in Weimar German artistic circles, and investigate their influence on an emerging humanitarian aesthetics after 1945. I will link the history of the “One World” discourse of the post-war era with that of pre-war European visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s and point to the continuities and ruptures in the careers of some of this culture’s main protagonists."

David Jünger is a Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Rostock. His fellowship will support the translation of his political biography of the German-American rabbi Joachim Prinz for publication with an American publisher. For the English-language edition, Jünger will conduct additional research and add a chapter on Prinz’s role within his congregation B’nai Abraham (Newark, later Livingston) and in the wider region of Newark and Essex County, New Jersey.

"Prinz was one of the most prominent figures of German Jewry in the late 1920s and early 1930s and after his immigration to the United States in 1937 one of the most important and influential representatives of American Jewry from the 1940s to the 1970s. He was the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Abraham in Newark and Livingston from 1939 to 1977 and a leading figure of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress in the 1950s through the 1970s. He became especially famous when he walked hand in hand with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in August 1963 and delivered a speech immediately before MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. His own experiences of Nazi oppression in the 1930s and the lessons of the Holocaust, he explicitly stated, were instrumental for his political activism in post-Holocaust America, particularly with regard to civil rights for the African-American community. Prinz’ biography is above all an outstanding example for the transnational constellation of Jewish history in the twentieth century."

From LBI News No. 118