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

Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago

Moshe Sluhovsky, "And Everyone Spoke German": Migration, Identity, and Socialization in the Formation of a Homo-Lesbian Community in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine

29 October 2025

Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Study in the Humanities
Mandel Building
Mount Scopus Campus
Jerusalem, 9190501
Israel.

Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History

Moshe Sluhovsky is Paulette and Claude Kelman Professor of French History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the head of the Lafer Center for the Study of Women and Gender and of the Institute of History. He got his PhD at Princeton University, then taught at CALTECH and UCLA before moving back to Jerusalem. Over the years he has held a number of fellowships, including a Mellon Foundation and NEH fellowships, and was a fellow at the NHC, Davis Center at Princeton University and Advanced Research Distinguished Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His latest books are “Believe not Every Spirit”: Demonic Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism and Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism. He is currently working on a GIF project on the Jewish presence in Gay Berlin and on the migration of gay and lesbian German Jews to Palestine in the 1930s.

Learn more:
Andreas Kraß, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Yuval Yonay eds., "Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine: Biographies and Geographies, 1870-1960" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022).

When queer Jewish people migrated from Central Europe to the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century, they contributed to the creation of a new queer culture and community in Palestine. This volume offers the first collection of studies on queer Jewish lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine. While the first section of the book presents queer geographies, including Germany, Austria, Poland and Palestine, the second section introduces queer biographies between Europe and Palestine including the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), the writer Hugo Marcus (1880–1966), and the artist Annie Neumann (1906-1955).

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.$

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