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
Shattered Objects, Shattered Spaces – The Destruction of Jewish Homes 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
Corresponding with history – Jewish Postage Stamp Collectors and Jewish Emancipation
In my work, I will demonstrate that stamps are historical objects that can be examined over time. They embody various spaces and countries, serving as receipts for franking letters while representing the issuing state. Stamps are also desirable to collectors, as they display images and interact within collections.
Importantly, stamps cannot be viewed in a social vacuum; they function as political resources that represent the issuing state and help collectors navigate their relationship with state politics. My focus is on Jewish stamp collecting and its connection to Jewish emancipation. This perspective shifts the balance of power towards minority perspectives and the oppressed, allowing those without authority to assert their narratives.
Exploring the relationship between Jews and their status as a minority in diaspora states, particularly in Germany, highlights how stamp usage reflects the gradual loss of emancipatory Jewish rights, which led to the tragic events of the Shoah. My research will investigate the “tactics” of resistance against oppressors and how Jews navigated, for example, the complexities of collecting Hitler stamps. I propose a comparative analysis of Jewish stamp collecting before, during, and after the Shoah to illustrate how stamps can rewrite history as a coping mechanism for trauma.
This study also raises questions regarding nostalgia and “melancholy,” particularly in the context of Martin Jay’s “Timbremelancholy”, and how it relates to the decline of stamp collecting as a pastime. The enthusiasm of intellectual Jews like Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg for stamp collecting raises further questions about its educational potential and role in exchanging ideas about state power and identity.
