Jewish Women Photographers: Undervalued Quality and Quantity

Tuesday, February 27, 2024
5:00pm (MT)
CU Boulder Campus
In-Person at Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Building, Room 220
and via ZOOM.

Please join us for this public talk by special guest scholar of the Louis P. Singer Chair in Jewish History, Dr. Michael Berkowitz. At CU Boulder, the visit is co-sponsored by CU Boulder’s departments of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures, History, and Sociology.

The late Queen of England was adamant about who she wanted to cover her 90^th birthday: Annie Leibovitz. She was not only an admirer of Leibovitz, who had photographed her previously. They were friends.

There is a long, complicated history of Jewish women in photography, especially color—which extends from Eastern to Central to Western Europe, Britain, and the United States.  A number of Jewish women also were connected to European royal courts and government administrations, of all stripes. While only a partial survey, the goal is to consider a new means of exploring Jewish history and the history of photography.

Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London and the editor of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Prof. Berkowitz has previously taught at the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, and the University of Judaism. He has held numerous residential research fellowships, among others at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  He is author of five monographs, including Jews and Photography in Britain (2015); The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (2007); and Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914-1933 (1997). Professor Berkowitz is also the editor or co-editor of another five volumes such as The Jewish Engagement with Photography (2017) (with Martin Roman Deppner); “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2010) (with Avinoam J. Patt) and Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond (2004). Prof. Berkowitz has worked on exhibitions and theater productions related to his research. One of his current projects is a monograph entitled Jews, Photography, Modernity.