Horror, Humor, Holocaust - Talk - PD Dr. Ilaria Briata - University of Hamburg
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24.03.2026
Horror, Humor, Holocaust - Talk
Horror, Humor, Holocaust. New Directions in Jewish Visual Culture
March 23–24, 2026
Institute for Jewish Studies
In the conclusive panel of the workshop Introducing: Jewish Horror, Adam Lowenstein, Dean Gold, Rebecca Margolis, and Louis Kaplan discuss the artistic interactions bringing together horror and humor, fear and laughter, in contemporary Jewish visual culture vis-à-vis the trauma and taboo of the Holocaust. After presenting their current work in media and art scholarship and filmmaking, the panelists dive into open questions addressing the continuities and discontinuities between horror and humor as genres and affects, the function of outsider/insider dynamics in artistic creation, with special reference to the use of unfamiliar languages such as Yiddish, the dilemma of freedom of speech in the artistic retelling of the Jewish past, and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as a case study and a shared cultural experience.
The roundtable was part of the workshop Introducing: Jewish Horror, organized by PD Dr. Ilaria Briata in the contest of the DFG project Horror and Manifestations of Fear in Early Modern Judaism, hosted by the institute of Jewish Studies of the University of Hamburg. For info and program, please visit https://www.religionen.uni-hamburg.de/en/jewish...
Adam Lowenstein is the Founding Director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as Professor of English and Film & Media Studies. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness (2022), Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (2015), and Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005), all published by Columbia University Press.
Dean Gold is an award-winning Israeli-Canadian director and producer based in Berlin. His short films have earned international acclaim, screening and winning awards in festivals and museums around the globe. He's currently at work on his debut feature, Coal—a Yiddish-language historical piece set in Berlin-Brandenburg in the year 1900.
Rebecca Margolis is the Pratt Foundation Chair of Jewish Civilisation at Monash University. Her research focuses on Yiddish transmission and cultural production over the last century to include literature, theatre, film and television. She is the author of The Yiddish Supernatural on Screen: Dybbuks, Demons and Haunted Jewish Pasts; Yiddish Lives On: Strategies of Language Transmission; Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945; and Basic Yiddish: A Grammar and Workbook.
Louis Kaplan is Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Cinema Studies Institute, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the same institution. His books most relevant to this roundtable are: The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minnesota, 2008), Photography and Humour (Reaktion Books, London, 2016), and the award winning At Wit’s End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke (Fordham, 2020).
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