Rachel BLUMENTHAL

Rachel Blumenthal is a research fellow in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Rachel completed a Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Dekel-Chen. The subject of her thesis was “The Claims Conference, the State of Israel and the Diaspora: 1951-1964. ”

In Vienna, Rachel will conduct research on the lives of Jewish refugees in postwar Austria. Using a range of archival sources, including the previously unexplored documents of UNRRA and local archives, she will examine the creation of communities by Jewish refugees after the war and the encounters between refugees and local residents in Upper Austria and Salzburg. The object is to understand how survivors of National Socialist persecution or exile in the Soviet Union reconstructed normality and planned their future. The study is also intended to illuminate the continuities and ruptures between the case of European postwar refugees and contemporary asylum seekers.

Daniel M. HERSKOWITZ

Dr. Daniel M. Herskowitz is the Stipendiary Career Research Fellow in Jewish Studies at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where he wrote his DPhil (2019). He was previously the Stanley A. and Barbara B. Rabin Postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, NY. Dr. Herskowitz is an intellectual historian and scholar of religion who has written over twenty articles on Jewish thought and Jewish-Christian relations, with special focus on nationalism, secularization, political theory, and medieval thought.

His first book, Heidegger and his Jewish Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2021), offers the most extensive and systematic analysis to date of Jewish encounters with Martin Heidegger. It argues that immediately after the publication of his monumental work Sein und Zeit (1927) and throughout the entirety of twentieth century, Heidegger’s philosophy was a key reference point in the negotiation of the boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and modern secularism in twentieth century Jewish thought. It claims that the Jewish responses to Heidegger reflect more than just a critical encounter with a challenging philosopher but an ongoing wrestling with the broken promises of emancipation and the politico-theological foundation of the modern world, and thus it encompasses the predicament of modern Jewish experience, with its hopes, disillusionment, tragedies and attempts of reconstruction. 

In Vienna, Dr. Herskowitz will conduct research on The Maimonides Renaissance In Interwar Germany, which offers an innovative analysis of the unexplored ‘Maimonides Renaissance’ that took place during the interwar period in Germany, and argues for its importance for the reception history of Maimonides as well as for our understanding of the Jewish experience during this momentous time in Jewish history.