28/05/2026
Save the Date!
A warm welcome to the first Annual "Bertha-Pappenheim-Lecture on Gender and Judaism" at Goethe University Frankfurt!
2 June, 2026, 18:00-20:00, Campus Westend, Casino Building, Room 1.801
Prof. Elizabeth Loentz (University of Illinois, Chicago) will present on „Affect and Emotion in Bertha Pappenheim’s Activism“
In a 1932 prayer German-Jewish feminist leader and social activist Bertha Pappenheim, implored God to sustain her rage in the face of injustice: “Grollender Zorn erfüllt mich! Ich will ihn behalten, er soll in mir brennen – solange das besteht, was ihn zu recht erregt.” Friends and opponents alike observed the strong emotions that compelled her activism but judged them differently. What Martin Buber admired as “passion and demanding severity borne of love,” others diagnosed as “man-hating” and “fanatical, almost pathological hate.” In dialogue with recent work on the role of affect and emotion in social movements (Penslar on the Zionist Movement and Gould on AIDS activism, among others), I trace the affective rhetoric in Pappenheim’s speeches and writing about two intertwined causes—women’s role in Jewish life and the campaign against the trafficking of women––to argue that anger, outrage, and moral indignation were not incidental to her activism but constitutive of it. These emotions, alongside others such as compassion, hope, and solidarity worked to mobilize others, create an activist community, and sustain their work over decades. I pay particular attention to the gendered double-bind that reframed Pappenheim’s justified rage as pathology, and to what it cost Jewish women to suppress the very emotions that injustice warranted.
Elizabeth Loentz is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and Associate Director of the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Hebrew Union College Press) and is currently completing a monograph with the working title: “Mame-loshn in the Fatherland: The Meaning of Yiddish in Germany from the First World War through the Postwar Occupation.” Broader research and teaching interests include German-Jewish literature and culture from the late 19th to the 21st century, the German-Jewish women’s movement, Yiddish in Germany, translation theory, and Holocaust literature. Prior to her doctoral studies, she taught German at the Haus Chevalier Clearing-House for unaccompanied refugee minors in Hallbergmoos, Germany.
The Pappenheim Lecture is co-organized by several institutions:
- Buber-Rosenzweig-Institut für jüdische Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte der Moderne und Gegenwart, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
- Cornelia Goethe Center for Gender Studies, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
- Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem
- Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo-Baeck-Instituts (WAG)
- Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für Europäisch-Jüdische Studien, Universität Potsdam
