The Herzog Centre for Near Eastern and Jewish Religions and Culture
Welcome to the Herzog Centre’s webpage. The Centre was established in honour of the family of Isaac Herzog, the Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1937 and was founded to facilitate the engagement of students and the Irish public with Jewish and Near Eastern history and culture through academic programmes, public lectures and cultural events. Building on a legacy that began with the study of Hebrew in the seventeenth century, Trinity College Dublin is the only higher-level institution teaching Jewish Studies in Ireland. Offering undergraduate modules and research post-graduate degrees, we are also concerned with outreach and public education. Each year we invite international scholars to contribute to our courses and to offer public lectures.
Our students engage in the study of Jewish history and culture in a multi-faceted way that includes study trips, exhibitions, conferences and study abroad programmes.
The Centre is embedded within Jewish studies in Europe and we have organised conferences with UK and European institutions, and in 2014 we held the presidency of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies and hosted its annual conference.
As the only higher-level institution offering courses and research in Jewish Studies in Ireland, we have become acutely aware of the importance of education in Jewish history and culture, not just for understanding the ancient and more recent past, but also for the current debates around issues related to European and Middle Eastern identity politics.
You can find further information about courses, student activities, public events and research on this site. If you would like to contact us directly, please do not hesitate to e-mail us: rodgersz@tcd.ie
Research
New Volume: Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation
The Herzog Centre is a hub for research in Jewish Studies in Ireland and most recently we published a volume of essays, Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, edited by Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn (2023). The volume is based on a conference that was held at Trinity’s Long Room Hub and has contributions from our associated researchers, Katrina Goldstone, Dr Peter Garry and Dr Trisha Oakley Kessler. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1302768
Funding: Lived experiences of Jews in Wales and Ireland
The Herzog Centre and the University of Bangor have been awarded a grant by the Learned Society of Wales Agile Cymru for a project comparing the lived experiences of Jews in Wales and Ireland. Two academic workshops are scheduled for early 2024, one in TCD and one in Bangor, to share relevant research and to facilitate discussions that will lead to future networks and collaborations between scholars of Irish, Welsh, Scottish and British Jewry.
Herzog Centre Associates
Dr Anne Fitzpatrick
Dr Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor in the Dept of Near and Middle Eastern Studiers and her research interests are focused on the study of how Judaism emerged against the background of the worldview of the ancient Near East. She has a particular interest in how Second Temple Judaism and the political structures which were based in the temple emerged against the background of how Jewish elites dealt with the challenges of imperial control.
Prof Mary Cosgrove
Mary Cosgrove is Professor in German in the Dept of Germanic Studies. Her research and teaching interests include representations of neoliberal culture in contemporary German-language literature and film, pathologies of the modern subject in fin-de-siècle culture, German-Jewish literature from the 19th century to the present, post-1945 and contemporary German literature, German memory debates since the 1960s, Holocaust historiography, psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and European melancholy traditions.
Dr Caitriona Leahy
Dr. Caitriona Leahy is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies. Her main research area has been contemporary Austrian literature, with particular focus on the writer Ingeborg Bachmann. She works on aspects of modernism and on intersections between philosophy, literature and the visual arts. Her most recent publications have been on the German artist Anselm Kiefer.
Dr Natalie Wynn
Dr Natalie Wynn is a research associate of the Herzog Centre. She has written and published widely on different aspects of Irish Jewish history, historiography, identity and experience. Her monograph, Community, Identity, Conflict: The Jewish Experience in Ireland, 1881-1914, is due for publication by Peter Lang in 2024 and she is the co-editor of the essay collections Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation, with Prof Zuleika Rodgers (Bern: Peter Lang, 2023, Reimagining the Jews of Ireland - Peter Lang Verlag); The Limerick Boycott in Context, with Dr Seán Gannon (forthcoming 2024); and Jewish Immigration in Myth and Reality, with Dr Mara W. Cohen Ioannides (forthcoming 2024).
Katrina Goldstone
As an independent researcher, Katrina Goldstone has written extensively on minorities, cultural diversity and Jewish communities. Since the 1990s, she has contributed features, in-depth articles and reviews to numerous publications in Ireland and the UK. She has also been a regular contributor to many arts programmes on RTE, the national broadcaster, commenting on Jewish history, Jewish writers, the Holocaust, Anne Frank, and various aspects of cultural diversity. Her book ‘Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile & War’ was published by Routledge in December 2020, in their Studies in Cultural History series and it is a groundbreaking study on the relationships and role of Irish Jewish writers responding to the key political crises of the 1930s, based on previously unseen archival material, memoirs, letters and poems. She was responsible for the research and co-wrote the script for the RTE documentary No More Blooms: Ireland’s Attitudes to Jewish Refugees (Louis Lentin, 1997). See www.katrinagoldstone.com.
Dr Trisha Oakley Kessler
Trisha Oakley Kessler works in immigration history, urban studies, business history, Irish history and Jewish studies and is a research associate at the Herzog Centre. Her doctoral thesis from University College Dublin (2020) examined political, social and economic change in 1930s Ireland through the prism of Jewish refugee factories. Her current research focuses on Jewish footprints in provincial Ireland, exploring Jewish-non-Jewish economic encounters and questions of identity and belonging. She is also working on a collection of business correspondence between a Jewish family business, Brüder Böhm, and its global trade networks. Trisha teaches modern Irish history at Cambridge University and is a Co-Convenor of the Cambridge Modern Irish History Seminar. She is a Research Associate at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.
Dr Peter Garry
Dr Peter Garry is a post-doctoral researcher and associate of the Herzog Centre who was awarded his PhD in the Dept of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin in 2023. His work examines the history, historiography and representation of the Cork Jewish community and his PhD thesis is entitled: 'They thought it was New York' An Examination of the Historiography and Representations of the Cork Jewish Community’. He served as an Associate at the Holocaust Education Trust Ireland from 2012-2019 and was a Museum Teacher/fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington D.C. July 2017/July 2018.
Dr Murray Watson
Murray Watson is a Catholic theologian and interfaith educator who received his PhD from TCD in 2010, on the Algerian-French-Israeli interfaith pioneer and Bible translator André Chouraqui. Murray's studies took him to Rome, Jerusalem and Dublin, and he now serves as an adjunct professor in the theology faculty of Huron University College in London, Ontario. Murray speaks and writes widely on Biblical and interreligious topics (especially in the field of Jewish-Christian relations), and a popularized version of his doctoral work was published by Paulist Press in New York in November 2023, Restoring the Gospels' Jewish Voice: André Chouraqui and the Intersection of Biblical Translation and Interfaith Dialogue.
Conferences
‘Re-Imagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation' (Long Room Hub, 2017)
‘Jews and Political Discourse’: British Association for Jewish Studies, Annual Conference, 2014
Postgraduate Conference: ‘Jerusalem in Tradition and History’
‘Re-interpreting Hellenistic Judaism in the Nineteenth through Twenty-First Centuries,’ Amsterdam, with University of Amsterdam, 2011
‘Workshop on the Reception of Hellenistic Judaism from the 18th Century to the Present’ with University of Amsterdam, 2009
‘Academic Colloquium in Honour of Prof. Sean Freyne’, 2007
‘Making History: Josephus and Historical Method,’ (International Josephus Colloquium), 2006
‘Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial: New Perspectives,’ 2009
Public Talks and Cultural Events
Cultural Events:
‘Jewish Life through the Documentary Lens’: with Toby Perl Frelich and Joseph Dorman. Four documentaries on modern Jewish life and panel discussion, 2019.
Reading of Primo Levi’s ‘Canto of Ulysses’ (Il canto di Ulisse); Herzog Centre and Italian Cultural Institute.
Monika Sears" A Holocaust Testimony'. Alison Deegan interview of Monica and Oliver Sears
'My Heart is in the East': Concert of Sephardic and Iranian Music, Samuel Beckett Theatre
Film Launch: ‘Francesco Lotoro: Entitled Long live life!’ with Italian Cultural institute Dublin and Holocaust Awareness Ireland
Talks and Lectures:
Prof. Deborah Lipstadt (Emory University), ‘The Eichmann Trial: Shaping the World’s Understanding of Genocide'
Prof. Philippe Sands (Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London) ‘East West Street: A Personal take on the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity’
Prof. Bryan Cheyette, 'Lost Tribes: Jews and Irish in Modern and Contemporary Literature'
'Monika Sears: A Holocaust Testimony'. Alison Deegan interview of Monica and Oliver Sears
Prof. Hanna Lerner (Tel Aviv University), '"We the People": Constitution-making in Deeply Divided Societies'
Prof. Jodi Magness (University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill), ‘Can these Bones Live Again: What do we know about how Jesus was Buried’
Prof. Daniel Boyarin (UC Berkeley), 'Did Jesus keep Kosher?'
Prof. Shlomo Berger (University of Amsterdam), 'The Jews of 17th Century Amsterdam'
Prof. Isaiah Gafni (Hebrew University Jerusalem), Jewish Diaspora: Punishment, Blessing or Universal Mission'
Prof. Steven Aschheim (Hebrew University Jerusalem), ‘Locating Nazi Evil: The Contrasting Visions of Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer'
Prof. James Kugel, (Bar Ilan University) ‘The Earliest Interpreters of the Bible and what they have to teach us about Contemporary Literary Theory’
Prof. Erich Gruen (UC Berkeley) 'Herod the Great, Rome, and the Diaspora'
Prof. Al Baumgarten (Bar Ilan University), 'Jewish Sectarianism: Ancient and Modern'
'Remembering Kristallnacht: Why Talk About The Holocaust?’ With Oliver Sears and Lenny Abrahamson
Adam le Bor (author), 'City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa'
Prof. Anthony McElligot (University of Limerick), ‘The Last Transport: The Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes, 1944’
Prof. Anthony McElligot (University of Limerick), ‘A False Lead, the Mists of Time and Some Questions: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean, 1944’ (2016)
Prof. Tessa Rajak (University of Reading), ‘The Maccabaean Martyrs in Jewish Memory: Jerusalem and Antioch’
Prof. Gary Rendsburg (Rutgers University), ‘La longue durée in Jewish Life, Culture, and History’
Dr Lars Fischer, ‘Socialists grappling with the Shoah: Early Post-War Responses’
Prof. Robert Gerwarth (UCD), ‘9 November 1938 and the Reversal of Nazi Jewish Policies: A Perpetrator’s Perspective’ (2014)
Prof. Anthony McElligot (University of Limerick), ‘Pogrom or Path to Genocide’ (2015)
Annual Holocaust Memorial Lectures hosted by the Herzog Centre:
Prof. Zoe Waxman (Oxford University), 'Women in the Holocaust: Lost Stories of the Shoah’
Prof. Nik Wachsman (Birkbeck, University of London), 'Inside Auschwitz: lived experience and the Holocaust'
Prof. Christopher Browning (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 'Remembering Survival: Postwar Testimonies from the Starachowice Slave Labour Camps'
Prof. Nicholas Stargardt (Oxford University), 'Jewish Children in Hiding'
Prof. Jan Gross (Princeton University), ‘Bystanders? Poland and the Holocaust’
Prof. Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘The Holocaust and the Politics of Memory in Post-Cold war Europe’
Prof. Richard Evans (Cambridge University), ‘How unique was the ‘Final Solution’?’
Prof. Steve Aschheim, (Hebrew University Jerusalem), 'Why the Germans, Why the Jews? The Perennial Holocaust Question
Prof. Renee Poznanski (Bar Ilan University), 'Being Jewish in France during the Second World War'
Prof. Jay Winter (Yale University), ‘Primo Levi as Moral Witness of the Holocaust’ (2013)
Prof. Raphael Gross (Deutsches Historisches Museum), ‘The History of a Document: Anne Frank and her Diary’'
To see our past events please click here.