The new season of the podcast Jüdische Geschichte Kompakt explores the experiences of the German-Jewish diaspora. Hosts Lisa Sophie Gebhard and Lutz Fiedler, together with their guests, examine how German-speaking Jews shaped daily life in places such as Buenos Aires, Haifa, London, New York, and Shanghai. The show delves into the building of local and transnational communities and investigates how individuals navigated their German-Jewish heritage after the Shoah.
For the first episode, historian Atina Grossmann from New York joins the conversation. Renowned for her keen sense of forgotten figures and places, Grossmann has spent several years researching overlooked places of refuge in the so-called Global South. In this episode, she discusses her family’s history, her research, and the ways in which the two are intertwined.
The episode “Remapping Survival: Atina Grossmann über deutsch-jüdische Fluchterfahrungen” is available here:
Our authors, Bea Lewkowicz (AJR Refugee Voices Testimony Archive) and Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library), participated in the inaugural Eva Reichmann Lecture, organized as part of the LBI 70th Anniversary Celebrations. Alongside Natalia Aleksiun (University of Florida), they examined Reichmann’s life, work, and legacy.
The historian and sociologist Reichmann was forced to leave Berlin in 1939 for London, where she remained until her death at age 101. As an academic who worked outside traditional institutions due largely to forced migration, sexism, and patriarchal structural barriers, she nevertheless made significant contributions to the study of antisemitism and the German-Jewish experience.
The roundtable discussion is available to view here.
The AJR Journal marks its eightieth anniversary with a special issue featuring Dominique Miething (Free University of Berlin), who discusses the legacy ofpacifist and educator Martha Steinitz.
AJR Journal, the journal of the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), commenced publication in January 1946 as AJR Information and has appeared every month since. It aimed to preserve the cultural heritage of German-speaking Jewry in the refugees’ new homeland, but it also sought to ease the process of the integration of refugees into British society.