May 2022

Since a number of events (including the two talks by Irit Felsen mentioned in the April newsletter) have unfortunately had to be postponed, May will be a rather quieter month for Insiders/Outsiders than originally planned. June, however, coinciding with this year’s Refugee Week, will be a busy one. For what is on offer this month, read on…
On Wednesday 4 May at 6pm UK time, Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, NYC – daughter of composer Alexander Goehr, and granddaughter of émigré conductor and composer Walter Goehr and photographer Laelia Goehr – will be in conversation with Steven Gerrard, Professor of Philosophy at Williams College, Massachusetts and Daniel Herwitz, Professor of Philosophy, History of Art and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, about her startlingly original new book Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread. A Philosophical Detective Story.

For further information and to book, click here.

Image: bookcover (detail)
On Thursday 5 May at 7pm, there will be another chance to experience the London Podium Cabaret, an immersive tribute by the Liszt Institute-Hungarian Cultural Centre to the uniquely Budapester humour as presented in London by Hungarian Jewish émigrés nearly a hundred years ago. The cabaret will be performed in the Liszt Institute’s brand new theatre space near Trafalgar Square, which also means that this time the tickets are free.

To book, click here.
On Friday 13 May at 6pm, to accompany the first ever public exhibition of Polish-born Holocaust survivor artist Dante Elsner’s paintings at the Camden Image Gallery, which runs from 11-16 May, Jaś Elsner, the artist’s son, will be in conversation with curator Jana Manuelpillaiabout his father’s life and work. This will be followed on Saturday 14 May at 2.30pm by a poetry reading by the artist’s granddaughter Maia Elsner.

To book for the first of these events, click here and for the second, click here. And to listen to the recording of a wonderful talk Maia gave for Insiders/Outsiders in June 2021, click here.

Image: Dante Elsner, ink drawing
On Monday 30 May at 11am, outside No.3 Golden Square, London WIF 9HR, the ceremony to lay a Stolperstein for Ada (Anna) van Dantzig, at the initiative of Morwenna Blewett and several times delayed due to Covid, will finally take place. The first Stolperstein ever to be laid in the UK, it commemorates a young Dutch-Jewish paintings conservator who came to this country in the 1930s to work, but in 1939 decided to try to rejoin her family in the Netherlands. She was murdered in Auschwitz on 14 February 1943. For further details, click here.

Image: Ada (Anna) van Dantzig

Looking Ahead
On Wednesday 1 June at 5pm UK time, Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of Insiders/Outsiders, is giving a talk for the US-based Fritz Ascher Societyabout the remarkable Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, creator of Life? or Theatre?, an ambitious fictive autobiography which deploys both images and text, and a wide range of musical, artistic, literary and cinematic references. Salomon found illusory refuge in the South of France but perished in Auschwitz in 1943.

For further information and to register, click here.

Image: Charlotte Salomon, Leben? oder Theater? [Life? or Theater?] (detail), ca. 1940-2. Collection Jewish Museum, Amsterdam. © Charlotte Salomon Foundation

Refugee Week 2022
To coincide with Refugee Week 2022, June promises to be a much busier month, with a rich programme of online events on offer. These will include a number of talks prompted by recent publications: among them, by Mike Levy about his new book Get the Children out! Unsung heroes of the Kindertransport, by Anna Neimaabout her new book Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall , by Dave Hannigan, author of Barbed Wire University: The Untold Story of the Interned Jewish Intellectuals Who Turned an Island Prison into the Most Remarkable School in the World. There will also be a talk by Dorothea Schoene about sculptor Jussuf Abboand an event paying tribute to stained glass artist Ervin Bossányi. Full details will be provided in our June newsletter.

Image: Get the Children out! Unsung heroes of the Kindertransport, bookcover (detail)