Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Sarah Wobick-Segev, and Shira Miron
Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2025).
Tuesday, 4 November 2025
11:00 CST, ZOOM
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
UW-Madison Center for German and European Studies
Still Lives is a systematic study of the ways Jews used photographs to document their experiences in the face of National Socialism. In a time of intensifying anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies, German Jews documented their lives and their environment in tens of thousands of photographs. German Jews of considerably diverse backgrounds took and preserved these photographs: professional and amateurs, of different ages, gender, and classes. The book argues that their previously overlooked photographs convey otherwise unuttered views, emotions, and self-perceptions. Based on a database of more than fifteen thousand relevant images, it analyzes photographs within the historical contexts of their production, preservation, and intended viewing, and explores a plethora of Jews’ reactions to the changing landscapes of post-1933 Germany. Here, the authors claim that these reactions complement, complicate, and, sometimes, undermine the contents of contemporaneous written sources.
Still Lives develops a new methodology for historians to use while reading and analyzing photographs, and shows how one can highlight an image’s role in a narrative that comments on, and assigns meaning to, the reality it documents. In times of radical uncertainty, numerous German Jews used photography to communicate their intricate, confused, and conflicting expectations, fears, and beliefs. Through careful analysis of these photographs, this book lays the foundations for a new history of the German-Jewish experience during the National Socialist years.
Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the Vice Dean for Teaching Affairs in the Humanities. He is the author of four monographs that explore Jewish contribution to German “national culture” throughout the twentieth century. They include Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (2020); and (co-authored) Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (Pennsylvania University Press, 2025). He has published articles and edited books on various topics in German and Jewish history, including memory culture in Germany and Israel; Nazi-related humor in Germany; Jewish youth in Nazi Germany; German-Jewish immigrants in Mandate Palestine; the German antiwar movement; and exile photography.
Sarah Wobick-Segev is a research associate at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Hamburg. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Homes away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg (Stanford, 2018) and co-author, together with Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, and Shira Miron, of Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (Pennsylvania University Press, 2025). Her research interests include European-Jewish cultural studies, gender studies, the histories of space, everyday life history, and visual studies. She graduated from UW-Madison in 2010 and is an alumni of the Mosse Program.
