Book Talk: Conversion and Catastrophe

Abraham Rubin joins LBI to present his latest book, Conversion and Catastrophe in German-Jewish Émigré Autobiography (2024, University of Toronto Press)

Conversion and Catastrophe in German-Jewish Émigré Autobiography is a collective biography of German-Jewish converts to Christianity, who recounted their spiritual and confessional journeys against the backdrop of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The book explores how Jewish emigrants interpreted their experiences of persecution and displacement through the hermeneutics of Christian conversion. It asks how chosen genres of writing both enabled and hindered self-understanding. Applying psychoanalysis, disability studies, and autobiographical theory to the life writing of converted Jews, the book offers new avenues for conceptualizing the Jewishness of historical subjects who disavowed their ties to Judaism.

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This event will be held in person at the Center for Jewish History. If you cannot attend the live event, it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

About the Author and Guest:

Abraham Rubin is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Before joining UD, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Lawrence University in Wisconsin and Goethe University, Frankfurt. He received his PhD in comparative literature from the CUNY Graduate Center.