Purple-blue graphic with the inscription “Digital Lecture Series”

Déjà-vu? A New Search for Old Answers

Online Lecture and Discussion with Ofer Waldman and Delphine Horvilleur

The second lecture of the series features Ofer Waldman and Delphine Horvilleur discussing religious historian Gershom Scholem. Three years after immigrating to Jerusalem, Scholem wrote a letter to Franz Rosenzweig entitled “Confession on the Subject of Our Language.” In it, he links the transformation of Hebrew — from a sacred language to an everyday vernacular, as he observed it in Jerusalem — with a vision of apocalyptic threat. Written in 1926, the letter’s impact remains incredibly relevant today.

Thu 22 May 2025, 7 pm

Where

online

Where, when, what?

The digital lecture series examines Jewish intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and asks what long-overlooked answers their work might offer to the current challenges of Jewish life in Germany.

We invite five intellectuals from the social sciences and literature to answer the question: Which historic texts do they return to for answers to pressing present-day questions? And how do they read these texts?

Delphine Horvilleur

Delphine Horvilleur, born in 1974 in Nancy, is well-known in France in the fields of Jewish culture and religion. She is one of the rabbis behind Judaïsme En Mouvement, a Paris-based liberal Jewish movement, and is also an author. Several of her books have been translated into German: Überlegungen zur Frage des Antisemitismus (Anti-Semitism Revisited: How the Rabbis Made Sense of Hatred, 2020), Mit den Toten leben (Living with Our Dead, 2022), and Wie geht’s? Miteinander sprechen nach dem 7. Oktober (How are you? Talking to Each Other after 7 October, 2024). Horvilleur is also a founding member of KeReM, the council of liberal francophone rabbis, and editor-in-chief of the online magazine for Jewish perspectives, TENOU’A.

Portrait photo of a woman with black curls and a blue blazer over a white sweater, looking directly into the camera. — Delphine Horvilleur; photo: Alexandre Isard

Ofer Waldman

Born in Jerusalem, Ofer Waldman moved to Berlin in 1999 as a member of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. He completed his studies at the UdK Berlin and played in numerous German and Israeli orchestras, including the Deutsches Sinfonieorchester Berlin, the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Waldman earned his doctorate in German studies at the FU Berlin and in Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He works as an author and journalist, and is active in multiple civil society NGOs. His literary debut, Singularkollektiv. Erzählungen (Singular Collective: Stories), was published in 2023 by Wallstein Verlag. In 2021, together with Noam Brusilovsky, he won the ARD German Radio Play Prize for the radio play Adolf Eichmann: Ein Hörprozess (RBB/DLF). In 2024, Suhrkamp publishers published Gleichzeit (roughly: Sametime), presents a correspondence between Ofer Waldman and Sasha Marianna Salzmann exploring the world in the wake of 7 October 2023.