Online Seminar: Jewish Perspectives. Reflecting Identities

How do we understand Jewish heritage before we attempt to represent it? This is the question at the heart of our September online seminar, which brings together two speakers across a single morning to strengthen the conceptual and ethical frameworks with which museum professionals engage Jewish history — including the Holocaust period and its impact on Jewish life. The seminar deliberately resists ready-made answers. Instead, it invites participants to sit with the theoretical and ethical dimensions that quietly shape everyday curatorial practice.

The morning opens with Dr. David Mendelsohn, an independent scholar whose research has taken him to Jewish communities from Morocco to India, and who works at the intersection of history, archaeology and sociolinguistics. In Tangible and Intangible Jewish Heritage in Contemporary Curatorial Practice, we will reflect on what happens when we stop reading Jewish history through the frame of the nation-state. Diaspora, in his account, is not simply a story of displacement but a formative condition. We will trace the transnational networks that connected communities across Europe, the Mediterranean and beyond; the shared textual, ritual and liturgical traditions that held them together across political borders; and the sheer diversity of Jewish experience — Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Romaniote, Mizrahi and others — that resists any single narrative.

The second half of the morning turns to what the Holocaust left unresolved for museums. Dr. Xenia Eleftheriou, Scientific Director of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and Scientific Advisor to the Jewish Museum of Rhodes, addresses the Ethics of Representation — the difficult, recurring questions that curators face but rarely have space to discuss. How do you represent communities and traditions that were violently destroyed, without allowing absence itself to harden into a reductive narrative? What counts as evidence when material culture, archives and living witnesses are incomplete or irrevocably lost? How do you acknowledge violence without slipping into either sensationalism or the aestheticisation of suffering? And as museums increasingly speak to audiences with no direct connection to these events, which interpretive strategies can sustain historical understanding while remaining attentive to the ethics of memory?
Each presentation is followed by a Q&A, with time built in for discussion. The seminar is open to all — you do not need to be affiliated with an AEJM member institution to take part.

Wednesday, September 16, 2026 | 10:00–13:00 CET | Online (Zoom) | Open to all.

Continues on-site in Athens, November 16–17, 2026, with an optional half-day on November 18. Registration opens September 1, 2026.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.