March 3-4, 2025
Katholische Akademie Berlin
This workshop focuses on diaspora and homelands in Jewish settings through the works of Jewish philosophers such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem and others. Contributors are coming from various disciplines and will think broadly about the theme, including non-geographical homelands such as language, literature, theatre and art as well as memorial culture and ritual practices.
During the workshop, Dana Hollander (Department of Religious Studies, McMasters University) will lead a reading of relevant texts by Hermann Cohen on whose work she has recently published a monograph (Ethics Out of Law).
The workshop takes place as part of a research program entitled Experimenting with tradition: The Life and Afterlife of 20th Century Jewish Intellectual Culture in the Baltic Sea Region. The program is a collaboration between Philosophy and the Study of Religions at the Södertörn University, in cooperation with The Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora and The Polish Academy of Sciences. For a short summary of the project see:
Experimenting with tradition – early 20th century East-European Jewish and German dialogues as a source of philosophical modernity – Östersjöstiftelsen (ostersjostiftelsen.se)