Speaker:  Philipp Lenhard, DAAD Associate Professor of History and German, UC Berkeley

Moderator:  John Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History, UC Berkeley

Friendship is a key category for understanding what Jewishness meant to many German Jews in the late Kaiserreich and up to the eve of the Holocaust. While Judaism had been transformed into a mere “community of faith” in the course of the 19th century in order to fulfill the externally imposed conditions for emancipation, this denominational concept of Jewishness came into crisis in the age of secularization. For many Jews, Jewishness was not predominantly a matter of faith or culture, but had a profoundly social content. Being Jewish meant, above all, socializing with other Jews.

The lecture traces this social history of friendship among German Jews and at the same time shows how the meaning of friendship was also reflected in the discourse of Jewish intellectuals. Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Strauss and Margarete Susman, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem were eminent thinkers of friendship – and thus reflected a fundamental trait of their epoch.

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we strongly recommend everyone in attendance to wear a mask at all times. Please arrive on-time to ensure you will have a seat. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.