Belongings: Jewish Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Europe and Beyond, conducted by the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Leipzig University and the Dubnow Institute, funded by the German Research Foundation and the Landecker Foundation, offers a multifaceted qualification program for outstanding international doctoral candidates.

Bringing together international researchers from all academic career stages, the International Research Training Group Belongings is based on the idea that Jewish history can be reconstructed, narrated, and commemorated in a meaningful and innovative way through the analysis of its world of objects. This includes objects that were lost, imagined, longed for, or that left a recognizable void due to the cataclysms of the twentieth century. But they are not studied without the people using them: the polysemous quality of the term “belonging(s),” which can mean both “being affiliated to a specific context” and “being owned,” serves as a framework for exploring individual as well as collective notions of the relationship between people and objects. 

With this material culture approach the IRTG Belongings aims to develop new tools for analyzing European Jewish life and its entanglements with the non-Jewish surroundings. Five research clusters −Practice, Ownership, Text, Memory, Stage − are implemented within the program to explore Jewish material cultures in Europe and the areas of Jewish (forced) emigration from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries from a multidisciplinary perspective. Its two cohorts, consisting of 22 international doctoral researchers and two postdoctoral scholars, will disseminate their findings to an international academic audience and the interested public − not only through conference talks and publications but also in various forms and at regular intervals on our website.

• The DFG and Landecker funded International Research Training Group offers its doctoral candidates the opportunity to pursue their scholarly degrees at both locations while fostering the development of transnational academic networks.
• From August 2024, 22 doctoral candidates and two postdocs participate in a structured five year program, working in two cohorts based in Jerusalem and Leipzig. Every participant is co-supervised by faculty-members from both universities.
• The program includes a comprehensive academic training program, including instruction in Jewish languages, German and other languages relevant to individual research projects. In addition, the participants are encouraged to gain practical experience through workshops and internships at museums, archives, and libraries.
• A team of 13 senior scholars from the three partner institutions, specializing in history, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, folklore studies, theatre studies and art history, ensures that research into Jewish material culture is approached from a wide range of spatial and methodological perspectives. Additional expertise is provided by renowned scholars in the field, who are associated to the program. 

Ofer Ashkenazi
Director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, Professor of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Hans Peter Hahn
Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
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