Ukraine in Context: Odesa

To this day, Odesa is considered the capital of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, art and theater, and also as an important center of the Zionist movement. The “Odesa myth” continues to resound in the voices of Ahad Ha-Am, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Simon Dubnow, Hayim Nahman Bialik and Isaak Babel. Never­theless, the city was also the scene of the first pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as later in the Shoah. In the course of the political up­heavals before and during the Soviet Union, there were several political, economic and social realign­ments in the city.

Art historian and curator Mikhail Rashkovetsky (Museum of the History Of Jews of Odesa, Odesa Biennale of Art, among others), Anna Misyuk, former Curator of the Literary Museum Odesa, and the artist and musician Nikolay Karabinovych will join us on the exploration of Jewish Odesa.

In the discussion series Ukraine in Context, the Jewish Museum Berlin, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education and OFEK aim to make Jewish perspec­tives on the war in Ukraine audible and visible, and provide insights into the complexities of present-day Ukraine in its historical context. Using the cities Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Odesa, Dnipro, and Lviv, Ukrainian artists and aca­demics will talk about life and survival in war, about plural affiliations, competing memories, identities and visions of cities and history.

A series of talks by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Civic Education), the Jewish Museum Berlin and OFEK.