David Sorkin, “Between Emancipation and Bildung: Constructing German Jewry” @georgelmosseprogram

Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 57 minutes ago

"Mosse's Europe: New Perspectives in the History of German Judaism, Fascism, and Sexuality"

https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/berlin-2019/

7 June 2019
Panel I: Jews and Germans: Languages of Culture

David Sorkin, “Between Emancipation and Bildung: Constructing German Jewry”

David Sorkin, Lucy G. Moses Professor of History at Yale, studied with George L. Mosse as an undergraduate. He is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996), The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000), The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008) and the forthcoming, When Jews Became Citizens: A History of Emancipation, 1550-2000.

For more information, see Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination (https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/6103.htm) by Darcy Buerkle and Skye Doney, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
The Mosse Foundation
Deutsches Historisches Museum
Jüdisches Museum Berlin
University of Wisconsin-Madison History Department
Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of History
Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History
Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung
Technische Universität Berlin
Koebner Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Leo Baeck Institute London
Leo Baeck Institute New York
Mosse-Lectures an der Humboldt-Universität
Schwules Museum Berlin

David Sorkin, “Between Emancipation and Bildung: Constructing German Jewry”

Elisheva Carlebach, Mosse Lecture 01: The Jewish Archives of Early Modern Europe

“What History Tells:” George L. Mosse on European Cultural History, 1860-1918 online course trailer

Kira Thurman, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

George L. Mosse, The Importance of Gay History (1996)

Panel III Discussion: David Warren Sabean, Udi Greenberg, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Robert Zwarg

Martin Jay, Mosse Lecture 03: From the Age of Reason to the Age of Reasons

Sven Reichardt, Fascist Violence: Paramilitarism and Radicalized Warfare

Moshe Sluhovsky, And Everyone Spoke German: Formation of a Homo-Lesbian Community in Palestine

Global Interdependence and Crisis of Democracy: Aldo Moros Vision, George L. Mosses Interpretation

$Christopher Ewing, The Color of Desire: Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany Christopher Ewing, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024). Tuesday, 1 October 2024, 15:00 CST ZOOM Chaired by Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston) Comment by Alexandria Ruble (University of Idaho) Sponsored by: Mosse Lectures George L. Mosse Program in History College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies Center for German & European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of History The Color of Desire tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations. Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or homonationalism, on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking. The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally. Christopher Ewing is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University. His first book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany, published by Cornell University Press in 2023, argues that race was central to the development of queer movements in the aftermath of gay liberation. He is currently developing a second project, From Gay Crimes to Hate Crimes: The Transnational History of the Violent 1990s, which answers the question of why the framework of “hate criminality” simultaneously became a useful way of making sense of a wide range of violences in multiple national contexts at the turn of the 1990s. His work on this project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of North Texas Libraries, and the Open Society Archives of the Central European University, and in fall 2024 he will be a visiting fellow with the Humanities Research Center and Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry at the Australian National University. His work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Sexualities, and Sexuality and Culture. Alexandria N. Ruble is an assistant professor of European history. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Central Europe, Germany, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the Cold War, women’s and gender history, and legal history. Her first book, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany was published by University of Toronto Press in 2023. Her second book project explores how political prisoners experienced persecution by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, and how they reintegrated themselves into East and West German societies after 1945. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fulbright US Student Program, and the German Academic Exchange Service, among others. Chad S.A. Gibbs serves as Director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. He is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, modern Germany, and war and society. Chad’s current project focuses on gender, geography, and social networks in Jewish resistance at Treblinka. Chad has held fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive, the George L. Mosse Program in History, and the USC Shoah Foundation, where he remains an Affiliated Researcher.$