The Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (DI), University of Leipzig
Contact details
Goldschmidtstraße 2804103 Leipzig
Germany
Tel: +49-341-217 35 50
Email: info@dubnow.de
https://http://www.dubnow.de
Head of Department/Director
Director, Prof. Dr. Yfaat Weiss
Email: weiss@dubnow.de
Activites
Offers courses in Jewish StudiesPursues academic research activities
Main research activities
The Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (DI) is dedicated to interdisciplinary research across multiple eras of Jewish life worlds in Central and Eastern Europe, from the Middle Ages through to the present. This research adopts a pan-European perspective and includes areas of Jewish emigration, especially Israel as well as North and Latin America.
Since April 2017, the institute has been headed by Yfaat Weiss, Professor of Modern History, focusing especially on Jewish history, at Leipzig University and Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The Dubnow Institute follows the secular tradition of its namesake Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), a Russian Jewish historian who mediated between Eastern and Western European Jewries.
At the DI, Jewish history is always approached in the context of its non-Jewish surroundings and is understood as a seismograph of general historical developments. In order to do justice to the complexity of Jewish life worlds and the close concatenation of social, political, and cultural developments, research at the institute productively links historical approaches with approaches from the humanities and social sciences, with a particular emphasis on honing approaches from intellectual history, memory, and lived experience.
Through events, university courses, and a broad range of publications, the research findings are presented both to a specialist audience and the interested public. This includes the internationally renowned bilingual »Jahrbuch des Dubnow-Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook«; the essay series »toldot«, and the magazine »Jüdische Geschichte & Kultur«. On the blog »Mimeo«, scholars offer an overview of their current research projects. The special collection of the institute library is also open to students and guests.
National and international research collaboration plays an important role at the institute. As of 2018, the Dubnow Institute is a member of the Leibniz Association. The institute moreover cooperates closely with Leipzig University, the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, as well as the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It moreover maintains close contacts with numerous scholarly institutions in Israel, the USA, Europe, and Germany, constituting a meeting place for scholars from all over the world.
Every semester, scholars from the Dubnow Institute conduct seminars, tutorials, and a research colloquium on Jewish history and culture at Leipzig University. The courses form a part of the regular semester program of the Historical Seminar and are conducted either in English or German. They are open to students of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, the Faculty of Philology, and the Faculty of Law, as well as to students of the interdisciplinary European Studies Masters at the Institute for Cultural Studies. The Dubnow Institute moreover participates in teaching at the University of Halle-Wittenberg and in the Master’s in »History and Politics of the 20th Century« at Jena University.
There is a Jewish Studies library
Search scholars Search institutions Search scholars by subject areas