This is a call for papers dealing with the similarities, differences, and entanglements of queer and Jewish migration experiences and their ideological and cultural dimensions, as well as antisemitic and homo-/transphobic narratives of Jewish and/or queer ‘unrootedness’. Accepted papers will be published as a collection of essays after the conference. Five 500 Euro grants (each) are available to support travel and accommodation costs.

In both Jewish and LGBT experience in history, issues of displacement, re-settling, and migration have played a decisive role. A dominant narrative of Jewish history, if not its most prominent one, tells of the loss of Jerusalem as a center, subsequent centuries of diaspora and expulsions from European countries, then the shattering, during the Shoah, of the hopes for a livable consolidation of diasporic existence, and finally the formation of a Jewish state in the Promised Land. One dominant narrative of LGBT biographies tells of expulsion and escape from home, and then migration to metropolises like San Francisco, Berlin, or Tel Aviv, where LGBTs can be themselves, and join a community that would function as their new home. These narratives of displacement and resettlement have been embraced and celebrated by both Zionists and gay liberation activists, just as much as they have also been criticized and condemned by anti-Zionists and some queer theorists.

Scholars like Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pelligrini (Queer Theory and the Jewish Question), among others, have discussed aspects of the relation between Queerness and Jewishness. The issue of Queer Migration has also been discussed by scholars like Kath Weston and Jack Halberstam and in GLQ’s special issue on ‘Queer/Migration’. Until today, however, the intertwining relations of Queerness and Jewishness from the viewpoint of migration and diaspora have not been discussed in their interconnections in a comprehensive manner.

For the last three years, a research project titled Jewish Presence in Weimar Gay and Lesbian Culture and the German-Jewish Contribution to the Emergence of Gay Culture in Palestine/Israel, 1933-1960, funded by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), has been dealing with these issues in Weimar Germany and Mandatory Palestine/Israel. Central European cities, Berlin being the most important among them, played a leading role in the development of modern gay and lesbian culture, and Jews participated in multiple ways in this culture. In addition to Magnus Hirschfeld’s famous institute and research center, Jews were members of gay groups, ran and frequented gay and lesbian bars and cafes, published in gay magazines, and supported the de-criminalization of same-sex relations in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. With the forced migration of Jews, among them queer Jews, from Germany and German-speaking metropolises in Central Europe, the complex and vibrant cosmopolitan culture in which they had participated and to which they had been contributing vanished irretrievably in the German-speaking world. But in Palestine, these immigrants led to the creation of a nascent gay and lesbian culture, whose history has never been investigated.

In order to conclude this research project and to extend its boundaries, we are interested in contributions that add theoretical as well as historical and empirical approaches, including the analyses of literary, artistic, or mass media representations as well as self-images of queer Jews in Weimar and Mandatory Palestine. We are especially interested in examining the traces of the queer Jewish contribution to the sexual cultures of pre-World-War-II central European countries and the contributions of the German queer Jews to the creation of gay sociability in Mandatory Palestine as well as other locations. Finally, yet importantly, we are interested in the role orientalist queer imaginations played both in the Jewish and the antisemitic imagination, both in central Europe and in Mandatory Palestine.

The conference will take place on 14-16 November 2019 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Confirmed speakers include Professor Andreas Kraß (Humboldt University), Professor Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Centre for Anti-Semitism Research; Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung), Professor Moshe Sluhovsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Professor Robert D. Tobin (Clark University), and Professor Yuval Yonay (University of Haifa). The conference language is English.

For individual proposals, please submit a one-page, double-spaced abstract in English before 30 June 2019 to kulturgeschichte-sexualitaet@hu-berlin.de. Please include in a separate page a short CV. Proposals will be evaluated on a first-come-first-serve basis. Inquiries and notifications of intention to submit proposals are encouraged.