The IRTG “Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond”, conducted by the Hebrew University, Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute, funded by the German Research Foundation and the Landecker Foundation, offers a multifaceted qualification program for outstanding international doctoral candidates.
Bringing together German, Israeli, and other international researchers from all academic career stages, the IRTG “Belongings” proceeds from the idea that Jewish history can be reconstructed, narrated, and commemorated in a substantial and innovative way through the analysis of its world of objects. This includes objects that were lost, imagined, longed for, or that left a recognizable void due to the cataclysms of the twentieth century. With this object-centered approach the IRTG seeks to implement new tools to analyze European Jewish life and its entanglements with the non-Jewish surroundings. Five research clusters (Practice, Ownership, Text, Memory, Stage) are implemented within the training group to explore Jewish material cultures in Europe and the areas of Jewish (forced) emigration from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from a multidisciplinary angle. Its two cohorts of 22 international students plus post-doc scholars will not only disseminate their findings to an international academic audience and the interested public, but will also foster the academic cooperation between Israel and Europe.
- The DFG-funded Research Training Group will enable doctoral candidates to pursue a scholarly degree in both locations and foster the establishment of transnational networks.
- Beginning in August 2024, 22 doctoral candidates and two postdocs will work together in two cohorts in Jerusalem and Leipzig in a structured program, during which they will be co-supervised by professors from both universities.
- The planned program includes a comprehensive qualification as well as the acquisition of Jewish languages. The doctoral candidates will also be introduced to the work of museums, archives, and libraries.
- A team of 13 scholars from the three partner institutions, whose expertise includes history, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and art history, will ensure that the research on Jewish material culture will be undertaken from a broad spatial and methodological perspective.
- The approval of the Research Training Group was preceded by several workshops that were held in Germany and Israel.