Materializing Memory and Sanctifying Place – Jewish Sephardic Heritage in Contemporary Spain
Threads of Identity – The Evolution of Israeli Fashion and the Attempt to Create a National Dress
The Written Silent, the Visible Absence, and the Text in the Written after 1945 – Materiality of Catastrophe, Exile and Belonging in Barbara Honigmann’s Writings
Processing Loss and Fostering Resilience – Jewish and Female Sculptural Strategies of Coping with the 20th Century
“Home was not Home anymore.” The Destruction of Private Jewish Living Spaces in the November Pogroms of 1938
Corresponding with history – Jewish Postage Stamp Collectors and Jewish Emancipation
Nation-Building and Cultural Heritage – The Making of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, 1892–1948
DVARIM POLANIM – Material Culture and the Changing Identity of Polish Jews in Israel across the 20th Century
Between Ruins and Revival – Jewish Identity and Material Heritage in Post-Communist Poland
Places of Jewish Knowledge – The Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Material Sites in Berlin’s Urban Landscape, 1871–1961
Traces of belonging(s) – on the materiality of the imprisonment experience of Jewish women in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp
Aufbau im Übergang – Curt Wormann and the Jewish National and University Library between Nation-building and Cultural Diplomacy
To Change, Question, and Criticize – Concepts of a ‘Werk’ and Concepts of Objects in Illustrated Magazines in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s.
“Mes poumons comme les rouleaux de la Thora” – Towards a Poetics of the Trace: Jewishness, Exile, and Writing in the Work of Hélène Cixous
Photo: Shlomit Strutti
Matters of Presence – Conservation and the Afterlives of Jewish Objects
This research project investigates how conservation practices mediate and transmit the presence(s) of 20th-century European Jewish objects, in light of the place envisioned for them in a post-witness, increasingly digital future. Grounded in the fundamental phenomenon that the hardware of culture persists long after the worlds that formed it have vanished, this study examines artifacts not solely as vehicles for narrative but as dynamic material forms through which absence and presence are continuously negotiated. Central to this investigation is a theoretical shift from frameworks that emphasize authenticity to a broader conceptualization of presence. Conservation – which emerged as a practice grounded in science rather than interpretation, prioritizing the authentic fragment over the whole and locating meaning in material – is observed for how it operationalizes and sustains presence against the constant threat of loss and transformation.
By examining the ways in which material presence is performed and stabilized by the networks and practices entrusted with its sustaining, this study asks us to rethink fundamental questions: What presence is essential to memory and the historical narrative? In what ways do conservationists negotiate the properties of materials in view of objects’ transhistorical significance? The case of European Jewish objects in the 20th century heightens the stakes of these inquiries and foregrounds their ethical dimensions. Drawing on ethnographic observation in conservation laboratories, Actor-network theory and comparative analysis across material types, this research positions itself at the intersection of critical conservation studies, media archaeology, and the anthropology of science to assess how diverse forms of presence are enacted and stabilized. This study ultimately aims to reconsider the future trajectories of Jewish material remnants by articulating theoretical and practical frameworks that reconceptualize how objects mediate our relationship to past and future.
