Stanford University

Yfaat Weiss

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Visting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
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Professor Yfaat Weiss teaches in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and heads The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. In 2008-2011 she headed the School of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 2001-2007 she headed the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. Weiss was a Senior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna (2003), a visiting scholar at Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig (2004), a visiting Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (2005-2006), at the Remarque Institute of European modern history of the University of New York (2007) and at the International Institute for Holocaust Research – Yad Vashem (2007-2008).

In 2012 she was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

The scope of her publications covers German and Central European History, and Jewish and Israeli History. Her research concentrates on questions of ethnicity, nationalism, nationality and emigration.  A selected list of her publications include:

  • Schicksalsgemeinschaft im Wandel: Jüdische Erziehung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933- 1938. Hamburger Beiträge zur Sozial- und Zeitgeschichte Band XXV. Hamburg: Christians, 1991
  • Zionistische Utopie – israelische Realität:Religion und Politik in Israel. München: C.H. Beck, Eds. Michael Brenner., 1999
  • Staatsbürgerschaft und Ethnizität: Deutsche und Polnische Juden am Vorabend des Holocaust. Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. München: Oldenbourg, 2000
  • Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration. New York:Berghahn, Eds. Daniel Levy., 2002
  • Lea Goldberg, Lehrjahre in Deutschland 1930-1933. Toldot – Essays zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010
  • A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa's lost Heritage. New York:Colombia University Press, 2011
  • Before & After 1948: Narratives of a Mixed City. Amsterdam: Republic of Letters, Eds. Mahmoud Yazbak., 2011
  • Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge: Zum Werk Barbara Honigmanns, München: Fink, Eds. Amir Eshel., 2013

  • "...als Gelegenheitsgast, ohne jedes Engagement". Jean Améry", Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, Eds. Ulrich Bielefeld, 2014. (to be published)

Book: "Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past", written by Amir Eshel

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Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Professor Amir Eshel (German Studies and Comparative Literature) traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature.

For a full synopsis, please visit the publication website by clicking on the book title below.

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Book: "Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism & Romanticism", written by Adrian Daub

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German Studies assistant professor Adrian Daub takes an interdisciplinary approach in this study of the development of the metaphysical concept of marriage.

For a full synopsis, please visit the publication website by clicking on the book title below.

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Andreas Kilcher

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA

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Bliss Carnochan International Visitor, 2013-2014
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Andreas Kilcher is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Kilcher is a prominent scholar of German-Jewish literature and culture, Kabbalah, and the European tradition of esotericism. He has written and edited a range of publications on the encounters between European and Jewish cultures from the sixteenth century through the present, with a focus on the twentieth century. His publications include Geteilte Freude: Schiller-Rezeption in der jüdischen Moderne (Munich, 2006), biographies of the writers Franz Kafka (Frankfurt, 2008) and Max Frisch (Berlin 2011) and numerous articles on German-Jewish literature, Kabbalah in modern Europe, and the relationship between knowledge and literature. Kilcher’s current project includes collaboration with colleagues at Stanford on the divergent constructions of Jewish ethnography in German-speaking and Russian-speaking territories. He was nominated by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Europe Center.

 

Masoumeh Bayat

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Student Researcher, The Europe Center
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Masoumeh is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Siegen in Germany. She completed her “1. Staatsexamen” degree (equivalent to Master of Education) in 2008 in Political Science, German Language and Literature Studies from the Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany.

Her PhD research, which is funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, is focused on the political and media representation of Muslims in the context of the German Islam Conference (GIC). In her dissertation, she analyzes the GIC at the political and media level in terms of where essential indicators of the success of the deliberative committee can be found. The guiding questions in her studies are: Who is “allowed” to speak for Muslims, and how are Muslim representatives selected?

As a Visiting Student Researcher at the Europe Center and the Department of Political Science from July 15th to October 15th, Masoumeh will study the transatlantic perspective of the German Islam Conference.

Mass Support for Global Climate Agreements Depends on Institutional Design

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Effective climate mitigation requires international cooperation, and these global efforts need broad public support to be sustainable over the long run. We provide estimates of public support for different types of climate agreements in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Using data from a large-scale experimental survey, we explore how three key dimensions of global climate cooperation—costs and distribution, participation, and enforcement—affect individuals’ willingness to support these international efforts. We find that design features have significant effects on public support. Specifically, our results indicate that support is higher for global climate agreements that involve lower costs, distribute costs according to prominent fairness principles, encompass more countries, and include a small sanction if a country fails to meet its emissions reduction targets. In contrast to well-documented baseline differences in public support for climate mitigation efforts, opinion responds similarly to changes in climate policy design in all four countries. We also find that the effects of institutional design features can bring about decisive changes in the level of public support for a global climate agreement. Moreover, the results appear consistent with the view that the sensitivity of public support to design features reflects underlying norms of reciprocity and individuals’ beliefs about the potential effectiveness of specific agreements.

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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Innovative leaders bridging diversity in Sweden and the West

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Roland Hsu
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The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world.   “Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking.  The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience.  The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.

The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research.  The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.

“This evening”, said Hsu,  “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference.  In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods. 

In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home.  Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity.  Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film. 

Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings.  e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.” 

Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program:  “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.”  “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again.  This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage:  Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg. 

Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture.  He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo.  Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.


Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University:

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"Three Reichs and You are Out": Germany in the 21st Century

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Germany has always been too strong or too weak for Europe. Now it is Number One again, but what a difference 70 years of democratic development and European integration have made. Merkel's Germany is no "Fourth Reich", and the political class knows it. If she isn't "triangulating" like Bill Clinton, Merkel "leads from behind" like Obama. After two murderous grabs for hegemony, Germany is an accidental great power - so strong because France, Britain, Italy and the rest are so weak.

Oksenberg Conference Room

Josef Joffe Speaker
Seminars

Harbor of Hope: A special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures

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This event celebrating Sweden's diverse cultures began with a reception at 5pm, followed by the showing of the award winning film Harbour of Hope (2011, Sweden / Poland / Germany / Norway / Denmark; Dir. Magnus Gertten; 76 min) with filmmaker Magnus Gertten. Ozan Sunar, the artistic director of Moriska Paviljongen (also known as "Moriskan"), rounded out the evening with a multi-media presentation on bridging communities through culture.

The Koret-Taube Conference Center
Room 130, Gunn-SIEPR Building

Magnus Gertten Swedish filmmaker Speaker
Ozan Sunar Artistic Director Speaker Moriska Paviljongen ("Moriskan")
Conferences
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