Jews and Jewish Religion in Western Postwar Fiction Film

Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th May 2019

International conference at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg August Universität Göttingen in partnership with the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Leo Baeck Institute London, and the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden (IGdJ).

The Post-war West often understands itself as an enlightened society. Yet religion, and Judaism more specifically, appear time and again in Western European films. This workshop discusses the presence of Judaism in Post-war fiction films. What is the role and the function of Judaism in Post-war films in Western Europe – after the Holocaust and given the fact that Jews are a minority? Are these films symptoms of wider currents of attitudes towards minorities and religion in Western Post-war societies? Do they reflect on specific national issues in the respective countries? How are these subjects, in post-1945 cinema, also an expression of memory politics and changing attitudes towards the state of Israel?
The workshop will focus on American, French, British, German and Israeli films, including biographic films, family histories, and explorations of multi-faith immigrant societies. In a comparative perspective, we also aim to ask how these representations of Judaism differ from Israeli productions – for whom the minority/majority question presents itself rather differently. The international workshop explicitly takes the disciplinary perspective of film studies for reflecting on the visual and narrative representation of Judaism in Western Post-war film.

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