Research Interests
We are creating a place of learning that will not only give expression to a wide range of disciplinary approaches and views, but will also be an incubator of new ideas and efforts aimed to enhance and deepen civil society.
The Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies is a new and distinctive interdisciplinary research centre that places the Jewish experience in a broader context. Aimed to act as an agent of change, its work focuses on the present and making past experiences relevant to the major issues of our day, such as the concerning global rise and changing nature of antisemitism.
Distinguished by its inclusive focus, the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies looks to Israel, German-speaking lands, the United States and the UK for insights and lessons that can help shape 21st century society, all through the lens of Jewish experience.
Current Postgraduate Researchers
Nina Hirshorn
PhD topic: 'Out of darkness: transcendence, remembrance and the quest for permanence in post-Holocaust Jewish stained glass art'
Nina's research focuses on post-Holocaust Jewish visual art. Her PhD specifically explores the contribution that Jewish stained glass art has made to this genre. It builds upon her MPhil thesis on the Holocaust survivor and stained glass artist Roman Halter. Nina is adopting a transnational approach to this subject matter, comparing the role of post-war Jewish stained glass art in the UK, Europe, Israel and America. Her research seeks to deepen our understanding of the sensibilities that European emigres and survivors - as well as sympathetic non-Jewish artists - brought to this art form. It will contribute to scholarly research into post-Holocaust memorialisation and to wider research on stained glass art.
Nina is looking forward to collaborating with fellow academics at Sussex on what until now has been a very under-researched area of Jewish cultural and art history.
Matt Marks
PhD Topic: 'God’s Grammar and Covenantal Realism: The Ordinary Language Philosophy of Jonathan Sacks'
Matt Marks' research attempts to offer a thorough philosophical reconstruction of the work of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. His thesis argues that Sacks’s vast corpus is underpinned by a consistent, yet previously overlooked, framework termed ‘covenantal realism’ - a sophisticated synthesis of ordinary-language philosophy and rabbinic thought. By tracing Sacks’s intellectual formation through his encounters with figures such as Wittgenstein, Soloveitchik, and Rabinovitch, the research seeks to resolve the apparent contradictions between Sacks’s intra-Jewish exclusivism and his interfaith pluralism.
Matt aims to demonstrate how this distinctively ‘grammatical’ approach allows for a religious commitment that is particularist yet publicly intelligible. He looks forward to contributing to the rich tradition of intellectual history and Jewish studies at Sussex.
Samuel Ogden
PhD topic: 'Austria and the Holocaust: Coming to Terms with an Unwanted Past'
Samuel is a recipient of the Morris and Bessie Emanuel PhD scholarship in Modern Jewish History and Culture. He is very much looking forward to drawing on the wealth of experience and resources at Sussex to enable his research, which will be centred on the questions of Holocaust complicity in modern Austrian public memory. The aim of this study is to better understand the ways in which contemporary Austrian society is confronting its Holocaust past and identify some of the forces which are shaping the contemporary memorial space. His interest in this field began while living in Germany and observing how German society has interacted with its past.
Samuel's work is thus designed to contribute to the body of work that examines similar phenomena in Austria – a nation with an analogous, but distinct, memorial past.
Yael Roberts
PhD topic: 'Beyond Borders: A Hasidic Imagining of Jewish Belonging'
Yael is the recipient of the Morris and Bessie Emanuel PhD scholarship in Modern Jewish History and Culture. Yael’s research is practice-based, interpreting 20th-century Hasidic homilies through large-scale printmaking and ceramics. Utilising creative and participatory methods to interpret these layered texts, she bridges gaps in meaning between the written and oral within these transcriptions. Looking particularly at the Ishbitz / Radzyn dynasty, she explores how these layered texts imagine Jewish Diasporism in the 20th century and might respond to rising nationalism, early Zionism, and the changing borders of their countries and communities in their use of land-based and ecological metaphors in their writing. Yael is eager to make good use of Sussex’s excellent creative and academic community to contribute to the broader fields of Jewish Studies and Fine Art.
Simon Williams
PhD Topic: Contested Pasts, Digital Futures: Looking Back to the Future of Holocaust Historiographies
Simon’s research focuses on how historiographies of the Holocaust have been shaped by key public and intellectual debates since 1945. As an Intellectual History project with a broadly interdisciplinary approach, the research covers various disciplinary flashpoints rooted in academic historical debates, broader intellectual engagement with the Holocaust in other fields, and public memory cultures. The goal of the project is to revisit and build a stronger understanding of exactly how the Holocaust, as a multidisciplinary, multinational area of study, has come to be, and how this knowledge can help prevent its instrumentalisation and reassert its position in a conflicted, digital world.
Simon is eager to make good use of Sussex’s excellent academic community and resources to help mould this ambitious and exciting project and make a meaningful contribution to a complex field.
Completed PhD projects
Liza Weber (2023) Documenta and its Double: Germany's Myth of Modernism and its "Degenerate" Jew
Florian Zabransky (2022) Agency and Vulnerability. An Intimate History of Jewish Men during the Holocaust
Stefan Boberg (2020) People from paper: German Jews through the prism of registration and census taking 1812-1943
Rose Holmes, A Moral Business: The Work of British Quakers with Refugees from Fascism, 1933-1939.
Astrid Zajdband, German Rabbis in British Exile: From ‘Heimat’ into the Unknown
The German-Jewish Archive
Since its establishment in 1994, the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex has attracted the deposit of various materials essential for the study of political, cultural and the everyday life of Jews living in German-speaking countries.
The collection contains diaries, letters, photographs, oral testimony, survival narratives and other biographical sources recording the history of Jewish families from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. In particular, these materials give insight into the history of Jewish refugees who came to the United Kingdom after the rise of National Socialism to power in 1933, and their families.
Our archive is also home to the largest collection of paintings by a Holocaust survivor–Arnold Daghani. The German-Jewish Archive is part of the University of Sussex Special Collections and is housed in The Keep, which is a centre of excellence for conservation and preservation of archival material and represents the new generation of archive buildings in the UK. Visit the collection catalogue.