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The Jewish Museum Berlin Fellowship

The Jewish Museum Berlin’s own fellowship program is increasing our museum’s visibility as a research institution. The program was launched when the Academy was opened in fall 2012 and supports research projects that examine not only Jewish history and culture, but also migration and diversity in Germany.

On the occasion of W. Michael Blumenthal’s ninetieth birthday, a fellowship in his name was launched as part of the Jewish-Islamic Forum, sponsored by the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung.

Black-and-white photo of a man in front of a shelving unit overflowing with file folders

This photograph by Herbert Sonnenfeld shows an employee of the Prussian Association of Jewish Communities in front of some filing shelves, Berlin 1935; Jewish Museum Berlin. Learn more about this object in our online collections (in German)

Our Fellows

In late 2014, Dr. Karen Körber completed the first fellowship project, titled Everyday Realities: Contemporary Jewish Life in Germany. At the heart of the project was the first nationwide study of second-generation Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants in Germany.

Our first W. Michael Blumenthal Fellow, who held the position from November 2016 to October 2018, was Walid Abd El Gawad with his post-doc project "To Know One Religion Is to Know None:" Reflections on Islam and Judaism in the Writings of German-Speaking Jewish Orientalists (1833–1955), which is shedding light on new aspects of the history of Jewish–Muslim relations in the modern age.

From January 2017 to May 2018, our second W. Michael Blumenthal Fellow was the education scholar Dr. Rosa Fava. Her post-doc project, titled Didactics of the Middle East Conflict, investigated teaching and learning concepts and materials about the Middle Eastern conflict in education outside the school system. Her emphasis was on continuing training courses for teachers and other multipliers.

Documentarian Yael Reuveny started her project Families in the GDR. A Documentary Research Journey, as a W. Michael Blumenthal Fellow at the Museum in October 2022. Her work deals with the lives of people who carried a double weight: the heaviness of German-Jewish history and the big dream of a new socialist state.

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