Leo Baeck Memorial Panel: LBI At 70

About the Lecture

Bridging Generations, Disciplines, and the Atlantic: LBI at 70

As they began their salvage of the material and intellectual legacy of European Jewry, the Leo Baeck Institute's founders hoped to assemble a narrative of the German-Jewish past that was comprehensive, synthetic, and "free from apologetic or tendentious coloring." Today, the collections of the LBI inform a corpus of scholarship that surely surpassed the founders' wildest expectations in scope, but whose "coloring" has also changed as much as society and the academy. The 66th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture will assemble a panel of scholars to discuss the evolution of the field of German-Jewish history over seven decades and its prospects for the future. At the center of their discussion will be the LBI as an institution that has both shaped and been shaped by the many turns of intellectual history. Featuring Michael Brenner (American University / University of Munich), Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia), Raphael Gross (German Historical Museum, Berlin), Marion Kaplan (NYU), and Helmut Walser-Smith (Vanderbilt).

After the lecture, visitors will have the opportunity to view LBI's anniversary exhibit, 70 Years of LBI: Bridging Generations.

This event will take place in-person at the Center for Jewish History and will be followed by a reception. If you are not able to attend the live event, the panel will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture is endowed by Marianne C. Dreyfus and Family, the descendants of Rabbi Leo Baeck

About the Speakers

Michael Brenner is Distinguished Professor of History and Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC, where he serves as director of the Center for Israel Studies. He also holds the chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture and an elected member of the Bavarian Academy of Science, the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Italy and the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 2014 he was awarded the order of merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2020 he was the first recipient of the first Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience. In 2023 he was awarded the Cultural Prize of Honor of the City of Munich.

He serves as member on many advisory committees, among them the Commission of the German Government to Reappraise the Terror Attack at the Munich Olympics 1972, the Institute for German and European Studies at the University of Haifa, and the Jewish Museum Berlin.

He published 9 books, which have been translated in 12 languages, and edited 19 volumes. His latest publications are In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism (Princeton University Press 2022), In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018), and A Short History of the Jews (Princeton University Press 2010).

Elisheva Carlebach is Salo Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society, and Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. Her books include The Pursuit of Heresy; Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany; Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe and Confronting Modernity: 1750-1880, volume 6 in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She has held fellowships at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, the Katz Center at University of Pennsylvania, and the Tikvah Center at NYU Law School. She served as Editor of the AJS Review and as President of the American Academy for Jewish Research. In 2017 she was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award of Columbia University, and in 2024, the mentorship award of the Gender Justice Caucus of the Association for Jewish Studies. Her teaching and research interests include Jewish-Christian relations, messianism, Jewish communities and Jewish women’s history in early modern Europe. In Fall, 2025, her new book on Jewish women in early modern Europe, co-authored with Debra Kaplan, will be published by Princeton University Press.

Raphael Gross is the President of the Foundation Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

Before assuming the role in 2017, he served as the Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and held the Chair of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. Previously, he headed the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, (2006-2015); the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt am Main, (2007-2015); and the Leo Baeck Institute, London, (2001-2015); as director.

Raphael Gross is a historian and the author and editor of numerous books on German-Jewish history and the Holocaust. Many of the exhibitions he initiated explore these and related topics.

In May 2023 Raphael Gross was mandated to evaluate the provenance research of the Foundation E. G. Bührle in Switzerland. He presented his report to the public in June 2024.

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her books: The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (Indiana, 2011). Her most recent book is Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale, 2020). All of her monographs have been translated into German.

Helmut Walser Smith is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and was the NEH Scholar in Residence at the Center for Jewish History in 2023/4. He is the author of several books, including German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (W.W. Norton, 2002), The Continuities of German History (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Germany: A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020). He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford University Press, 2011). Over the years, his research has been supported by the NEH, the DAAD, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.