Workshop

19 May 2023

Photo: Malva Schalek, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem/Israel

We would like to invite you to a workshop on "Limits of Faith: Jewish Women’s Views of the Divine, Jewish History, and Tradition after Auschwitz." It will take place on 13 and 14 June 2023.

Date
13–14 June 2023

Convenor
Sarah Wobick-Segev (Universität Hamburg)

Abstract
The Holocaust was a traumatic event that challenged human understanding and occasioned impassioned, intellectual reactions in various genres. It is well known that the Holocaust provoked many to question and/or reinterpret their understanding of God and religion (Hans Jonas; Elie Wiesel). At the same time, its material realities also gave rise to questions about the ethical limits of scepticism and sceptical inquiry (Hayden White; Jean Amery). Many of these questions and their answers have been discussed by male thinkers; what about the many women who wrote on similar topics? This workshop seeks to give a specific voice to Jewish women’s views on questions such as the nature of the Divine, the place of persecution in Jewish history and memory, and the meaning of Jewish tradition after Auschwitz by examining a wider repertoire of religious responses.
The workshop will foreground papers that explore women’s theological reactions—widely conceived—to the antisemitic persecution of the 1930s and the Shoah. It will ask how female authors and thinkers questioned the nature of Jewish religion and tradition in light of the Holocaust and how, if at all, these religious and theological considerations influenced possible limits they placed under inquiry.

Participants