The talk is part of the research colloquium “Passing Through Hands: Objects in Jewish Everyday Lives” in cooperation with the IRTG “Belongings”

This research colloquium examines how everyday objects shape, mediate, and preserve Jewish lived experience across time, space, and generations. It approaches material culture as a site where history, memory, affect, and identity intersect, focusing on ordinary domestic, personal, inherited, and mobile objects as carriers of layered histories.

Speakers explore how everyday objects contain multiple histories and how the »everyday« is produced through material practices. Central is the entanglement of subjects and objects: how things shape human experience and enable individual and collective, transgenerational forms of attachment and memory.

Drawing on Jewish Studies, Material Culture Studies, Anthropology, History, Memory Studies, and curatorial and literary perspectives, the lectures highlight objects as active participants in social life. Special attention is given to materiality’s affective qualities, the way how objects evoke longing, loss, comfort, belonging, and ambivalence, as well as to the temporalities and spaces objects create, particularly in contexts of migration, displacement, and diaspora.

By foregrounding the everyday, the colloquium expands approaches to Jewish history beyond textual and institutional frameworks, emphasizing ordinary objects as archives of lived experience. Organized by the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig University, and the International Research Training Group »Belongings,« the series invites scholars, students, and the public to reconsider how Jewish life is remembered and imagined through material worlds.

Colloquium programme:

Time: Thursdays, 5.15 to 6.45 p.m.
Venue: Leipzig/digital

7 May 2026
Dubnow Institute/Stream
Mikołaj Łoziński 
“Some things should stay within the family”
A conversation about the book Książka (2011)

21 May 2026
Dubnow Institute/Stream
Robert Mueller-Stahl
Capturing Life. German-Jewish Private Photography in the 1930s

4 June 2026
Dubnow Institute/Stream
Sara Soussan in conversation with Alina Gromova
The Everyday in a Vitrine. Curating the unfolding Present in German Jewish Museums

11 June 2026
digital
Talia Tokatly 
Blood Butterfly Formation. Epigenetic Objects, the Migration of Things from their Original Places and their Metamorphosis in the Work of Talia Tokatly

2 July 2026
Dubnow Institute/Stream
Anna Shternshis
Lard on Challah. Soviet Jewish Food Practices in the 1920s – 1950s

Participation:
Four of the five events will take place in person at the Dubnow Institute and will also be streamed via Zoom. One lecture will be held exclusively online. 
To participate in-person, registration is required using this form: REGISTRATION

If you would like to participate digitally, You can find the access link on the Dubnow-Institut webpage a few days before the event. Registration is not required.

Veranstalter: Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow e.V. in Kooperation mit dem Polnischen Institut Berlin – Filiale Leipzig

Colloquium programme (PDF)
Info: dubnow.de/en/event/passing-through-hands-objects-in-jewish-everyday-lives, znak.com.pl
Entrance: free
Location: Simon-Dubnow-Institut, Goldschmidtstr. 28, 04103 Leipzig

Foto: Mikołaj Łoziński © Rafał Komorowski (Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Programm des Polnischen Instituts: