Documenting Life in Exile: Austrian Heritage Collection (AHC) Seminar

Since the mid-1990s young Austrians approach survivors from Austria for documents, questionnaires and interviews at the Leo Baeck Institute (New York).  Most programs in Jewish Studies do not have their focus on rabbinic literature but rather on Modern Jewish History and Literature. However it makes a difference if students get the chance to discover rabbinic thinking, its subtlety, its intertextuality, and its ability to give new meaning to old texts. Rabbinic texts not only allow us to see Late Antiquity Jewish discourses in their political and cultural context but also enable a direct encounter with the creativity of the rabbinic authors of that time. In our seminar this shall be discussed and shown by means of some passages of Midrash Genesis Rabba.

All welcome.

The chair for this seminar will be Dr James Jordan

Speaker biography

Albert Lichtblau is vice chair of the Centre for Jewish Cultural History and professor in the Department of History at the University of Salzburg (Austria), where he teaches contemporary history. His fields of scholarly expertise are Jewish, genocide and migration studies, oral history and audiovisual history.