Amir Eshel is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and the Director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe at Stanford University. Born in Haifa, Israel, Amir Eshel competed his Ph.D. at the Universityof Hamburg, Germany, before arriving at Stanford in 1998.
Amir Eshel's work focuses on the German-Jewish literary and philosophical tradition, on postwar German literature, on contemporary Hebrew prose as well as on theoretical approaches to the study of memory and history. His first book,
Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah, offers a study of temporal forms in the work of Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Rose Ausländer, Yehuda Amichai, Dan Pagis, Tuvia Rübner and Jacob Glatstein. He has published essays on German-Jewish literature and culture, postwar German literature (Günther Grass, Alexander Kluge, Martin Walser and Durs Grünbein, among others). Recently, he published a longer study dedicated to Hebrew literature and the 1948 expulsion/flight of Palestinians titled
Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the literary engagement with the past in the contemporary German, Israeli and Anglo-American novel.
Adi Gordon is a post-doctoral fellow at the Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of
"In Palestine". In a Foreign Land: The Orient A German-language Weekly between German Exile and Aliyah (Jerusalem, 2004), and more recently the editor of
Brith Shalom and Bi-National Zionism: The Arab Question as a Jewish Question (Jerusalem, 2008). The title of his 2008 dissertation is
New Politics in an Old Key: Arnold Zweig, Hans Kohn and the Central European Jewish Generation of 1914.
Udi Greenberg is completing his PhD in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on German Emigrant Intellectuals and the Weimar Origins of the Cold War. His recent and upcoming publications include
Germany's Postwar Reeducation, the Cold War University, and their Weimar Intellectual Roots, (in: Journal of Contemporary History Special Issue on the Cold War, editor Jeremi Suri [forthcoming]),
Theology, Politics, and the Weimar Origins of the Cold War: the Debate between Cael J. Friedrich and Carl Schmitt (in: The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology and Law, editor Rudy Koshar [forthcoming]), and several articles on Walter Benjamin.
Dieter Grimm is a Professor of Law and a Judge of constitutional law, as well as the Rector of the Wissenschaftskollegs zu Berlin a.D. Prof. Grimm is a Guest professor at New York University Law School and Yale Law School. Since 2008 he is also a guest professor at Harvard Law school. Among his recent publications:
Verfassung. Zur Geschichte des Begriffs von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (zusammen mit H. Mohnhaupt), Berlin 1995;
Das Reichsgericht in Wendezeiten, Leipzig 1997;
Die Verfassung und die Politik. Einsprüche in Störfällen München 2001;
Wissenschaftsfreiheit vor neuen Grenzen? Göttinger Universitätsrede 2006;
Raphael Gross : Born in Zurich, Raphael Gross studied History, Philosophy and Literature in Zurich, Berlin, Bielefeld, Cambridge, Jerusalem and Essen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1997. Gross was a Research Fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Center for German-Jewish Literature & Cultural History in Jerusalem, Research Associate at the Institute for Social Research, Hamburg and Assistant Professor at the Chair in Modern History at Bochum University. Since 2001, Raphael Gross is Director of the LBI London and acts as co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book. He is Director of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt (since 2006) and of Fritz Bauer Institute Study and Documentation Center on the History and Impact of the Holocaust (since 2007). Furthermore, he is honorary professor at Frankfurt University. His research concentrates on German History, History of Ideas, German-Jewish History and the Holocaust. His publications include
Jüdische Geschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte. Festschrift für Dan Diner zum 60. Geburtstag Ed.(with Yfaat Weiss ed.). Göttingen 2006;
Recht und Moral in Deutschland 1945: Das Beispiel Fritz von Hippel, in: Anne Klein (Hg.), Die Kölner Justiz und der Umgang mit dem nationalsozialistischen Unrecht an den Juden. Köln 2003;
Eine Welt, die ihre Wirklichkeit verloren hatte... Jüdische Überlebende des Holocaust in der Schweiz, Ed. (with Eva Lezzi and Marc R. Richter) Zürich 1999
Martin Kavka is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. He is the author of
Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), which won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Philosophy and Thought, presented by the Association for Jewish Studies for the best book in this subfield published between 2004 and 2008. He is also the co-editor of
Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader (SCM/Eerdmans), and
Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibility of Philosophy of Religion (Fordham); the latter will appear in the summer of 2009.
Alexandra Kemmerer is a research fellow at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig and head of the institute's section "Law - Institutions - Politics". She is currently completing her Ph. D. in law at the Bayerische Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg, on conceptual aspects of European citizenship, and is now embarking on a research project on the history of European Law. Her research interests include European Public Law (Ius Publicum Europaeum), International Law, Constitutional Theory, Comparative Constitutional Law and Context(s) of Law. She is co-editor of the German Law Journal. Alexandra Kemmerer's writings on law, religion, politics, arts and humanities regularly appear, inter alia, in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Recent publications: The Turning Aside. On International Law and Its History, in: Rebecca M. Bratspies/Russell A. Miller (eds.): Progress in International Law, Boston/Leiden 2008, 71-93; À la recherche de l´individu. Europas Zukunft in seinen Bürgern, in: Christian Joerges/Matthias Mahlmann/Ulrich K. Preuß (eds.): "Schmerzliche Erfahrungen" der Vergangenheit und der Prozess der Konstitutionalisierung Europas, Wiesbaden 2008, 115-127; The Pouvoir Constituant in Times of Transition, in: Hauke Brunkhorst (ed.), Demokratie in der Weltgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2009, 507-517; Towards Progress? History and Theory of International Law, in: Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, Washington 2009 (in press).
Mordechai Kremnitzer is the Bruce W. Wayne Professor of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was formerly Dean of the Faculty. He teaches Criminal Law and Constitutional Law. Since 1994, he has been a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.
Professor Kremnitzer has published extensively in the fields of criminal, military, public and international law. He is co-author of the proposal for a new general part of the penal code for Israel (a proposal which has been adopted by the Knesset). His books deal with judicial activism, Basic Law: The Army, the offence of sedition, libel, official secrets, disqualification of parties and lists, and targeted killings.
Cilly Kugelmann is programme director and vice director of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Kugelmann studied art history and general history at the Hebrew University, and educuational sciences, sociology, and psychology in Frankfurt a.M. Alongside her studies and following it, she organized conferences within the context of political education on the subjects of Jewish history and the conflict in the Middle East. She has been part of the editorial team of the magazine
Babylon, Contributions to Contemporary Jewish Living since 1980 and has been involved in the publication of several books on the post-war history of Jews in Germany and on anti-Semitism.
Shai Lavi is director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Her fields of expertise include Sociology of Law, Political Theory, and German-Jewish History.
Selected Publications:
Juden und Muslime in Deutschland: Recht, Religion, Identität - Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 2009, Brunner / Lavi (Hg.);
Crimes of Action, Crimes of Thought: Arendt on Reconciliation, Forgiveness and Judgment, in: Collected Essays on Hannah Arendt, edited by Roger Brekowitz (in press, Fordham University Press, 2009);
The Jews are Coming: Vengeance and Revenge in Post-Nazi Europe, in: Law, Culture and Humanities (2005) Vol. 1(3) pp. 282-301
Nitzan Lebovic is a Yad Handaiv (Rothschild foundation) post-doctoral fellow and a researcher at the center for German-Jewish studies at Sussex University. He teaches German-Jewish history at Tel-Aviv University, and runs research projects at the Van Leer Institute and the Institute for Democracy. Nitzan published articles on different topics in German and German-Jewish history and philosophy, as well as about history and theory of film. He edited a special issue of the
New German Critique dedicated to the history and theory of Political Theology, and a special issue of the
Tel Aviv Journal of History, Zmanim (Times).
Vivian Liska is Professor of German Literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Teaches Modern German Literature and Literary Theory. Most recent publications:
Modernism (ed. with Astradur Eysteinsson) 2007,
Giorgio Agamben’s Empty Messianism (in German, 2008) and
When Kafka Says ‚We’. Uncommon Communities in German Jewish Literature (2009).
Menachem Lorberbaum (Tel Aviv Univ.) has chaired the Department of Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University (2004) and is the founding chair of the Department of Hebrew Culture Studies (2004-2008). He is presently chair elect of the School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Prof. Lorberbaum is also a founding member of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem and is a senior fellow of its Advanced Institute for Judaic Studies.
Lorberbaum is author of
Politics and the Limits of Law (Stanford 2001; Hebrew: 2006) and
We are Dazzeled by His Beauty (Hebrew, Forthcoming). Together with Professors Michael Walzer of Princeton and Noam Zohar of Bar-Ilan he is a senior editor of the Jewish Political Tradition series (vol 1 "Authority," Yale University Press 2000, Hebrew: 2007; vol. 2 "Membership," Yale University Press 2003). He is editor of the new and first complete Hebrew translation of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (Shalem, in press). His Hebrew collection of papers in political philosophy, Leviathan in the Holy Land, has been accepted for publication by Yediot Aharonot publishers. Prof. Lorberbaum has also published three volumes of Hebrew verse and is together with Dr. Michal Govrin, editor of the Devarim poetry series of Carmel publishers. His new book of translation and poetics Transpositions is now in preparation.
Thomas Meyer has been Research Associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig since September 2007. From August 2005 to August 2007, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Minerva Foundation at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Centre in Jerusalem. In this period he also served as a lecturer on the philosophy of the 20th century at Tel Aviv University. Since 2005 he has been a lecturer at the University of Munich where he obtained his Doctorate in 2003 in philosophy. In 2008 he finished his Habilitation (second doctor degree).
He is the author of the first intellectual biography of Ernst Cassirer (second edition 2007), and a monograph on the relationship between Neokantianism and cultural philosophy under the title
Kulturphilosophie in gefahrlicher Zeit (2007). In 2008 he published a book on the Jewish intellectual movements in Germany between 1933 and 1938 (
Vom Ende der Emanzipation), and a second volume on this topic in 2009 (
Zwischen Philosophie und Gesetz).
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is director of the Institute for German-Jewish History and Professor at Hamburg University. Her main fields of research include: German and German-Jewish History in the 19th and 20th century, Military History, Spanish History, Gender History.
She is author of:
"Krieg und Fliegen". Die Legion Condor im Spanischen Bürgerkrieg (forthcoming);
Denkmalsfigur. Biographische Annäherung an Hans Litten (2008); co-editor of:
Auch in Deutschland waren wir nicht mehr zuhause. Jüdische Remigration nach 1945 (2008);
Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte (2005)
Eugene Sheppard is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought, Associate Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. He received his Ph.D. at UCLA in the department of History in 2001. He is the author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Brandeis University Press 2006), a critical assessment of the development of this controversial and enigmatic German-Jewish refugee's political philosophy and its legacy. Professor Sheppard is co- co-editing a volume of Simon Rawidowicz?s Nachlass with David N. Myers and Benjamin Ravid. He and Samuel Moyn are managing editors of a forthcoming series on Brandeis University Press/UPNE entitled "Readings in Modern Jewish Thought." He is co-editor of the "AJS Review" book reviews. He is currently writing a book which profiles number of 20th century European intellectuals and refugees engaging problems of modern secularization and the emergence and legitimacy of forms of authority and coercion, including figures such as Otto Kirchheimer, Ernst Kantorowicz, Valeriu Marcu, Selma Stern, Jacob Taubes and Susan Taubes.
Martin Treml is born in Linz, Austria, studied science of religion, Jewish studies, philosophy and art history in Vienna and Berlin. 1999/2000 Research Fellow, Franz Rosenzweig Centre Jerusalem, 2006 Senior Saxl Fellow, Warburg Institute London. He is currently head of the department Archive/Kulturwissenschaft at the Center for the Study of Literature and Culture in Berlin. His main fields of work are the theories and figures of Western religions, the German-Jewish cultural history since 1750 and the reception of antiquity.
Publications: (Ed./Com.) Martin Buber Werkausgabe, vol. 1: Frühe kulturkritische und philosophische Schriften, (Gütersloh 2001);(Ed., with K. Brack) Erich Auerbach. Geschichte und Aktualitaet eines europaeischen Philologen, Berlin 2007); (Ed., with D. Weidner) Nachleben der Religionen. Kulturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Dialektik der Säkularisierung, (Muenchen 2007); (Ed./Comm) Jacob Taubes – Carl Schmitt: Korrespondenz (forthcoming)
Mirjam Wenzel is the head of the Media Department at the Jewish Museum Berlin. She has completed her PhD thesis at Ludwig-Maximilians-University where she was working as Research Assistent. She co-edited several volumes of Siegfried Kracauer’s writings (at Suhrkamp Publishing House) and won several awards among them the Leo Baeck Fellowship. Her publications concentrate on questions of representation, Critical Theory and on German-Jewish-relations, see for instance: Lyotard im Widerstreit mit Adornos Weigerung: Reflexionen über Auschwitz und juridische Verfahren zur ›Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit‹,in: Friedrike Faß, Sarah Speck, Volker Weiß (eds.), Herrschaftsverhältnisse und Herrschaftsdiskurse? (Münster, 2006), pp. 50-72); Maus, Toys and Him. Contemporary Fine Art as a Reflection on the Reception of History, in: Martin Davies, Chris Szejnmann (eds.), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (London, 2006), pp. 229-246; (together with Tsafrir Cohen and Avi Pitchon, eds.); Wonderyears: New Reflections on the Shoah and Nazism in Israel (Berlin, 2003);
Christian Wiese Wiese is Professor of Jewish History, director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and co-director of the Centre for Modern European Cultural History at the University of Sussex. His research focuses mainly on modern Jewish social and intellectual history, the history of Zionism, Jewish thought, the history of antisemitism, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations. He is currently writing an intellectual biography of Robert Weltsch. His most recent publications include:
The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, translated by Jeffrey Grossman and Christian Wiese (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2007);
Challenging Colonial Discourse. Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany, translated by Barbara Harshav and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2005);
Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas. Historical and Philosophical Studies, co-edited with Hava Tirosh Samuelson (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2008);
Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities – Encounters – Perspectives, co-edited with Andreas Gotzmann (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2007);
Re-Defining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation: Comparative Perspectives on Samuel Holdheim, (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2007)
Izhak Englard is Bora Laskin Professor of Law (Emeritus), Hebrew University, Jerusalem Former Dean, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Member of Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law; 1997 Israel Prize in Law; 1997-2003 Justice of the Israel Supreme Court. Author of many books and articles on Tort Law, Contract Law, Jewish Law, State and Religion, Jurisprudence, Legal History and Comparative Law.