Lunchtime Lecture: Deborah Hertz on Gender in German-Jewish Historiography

The 7th and final lecture of LBI's 70th Anniversary Lecture Series

On December 3 at 12:00 PM EDT, Deborah Hertz will discuss gender in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

This lecture series will take place online.

About Deborah Hertz:

Deborah's involvement with the Leo Baeck Institute began in Jerusalem in 1970, when she found the LBI Yearbooks and especially Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen published by East and West Press in 1957. It was not until 1975 that she began to visit the East 73rd Street townhouse where the New York City Leo Baeck Institute office was located. And in the year 2002-03 she spent a year revising her How Jews Became Germans at the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem on Bustani Street.

Deborah received a PhD in History at the University of Minnesota in 1979. She is currently the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of California at San Diego. She taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Sarah Lawrence College before coming to UCSD in 2004. She has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. Her two major books are: Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin and How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation n Berlin, both published by Yale University Press and both translated into German. She is currently finishing a book called Visionaries, Lovers and Mothers: Jewish Women from Conspiracy to Kibbutz.