Events
Workshop | Introducing: Jewish Horror
March 23–24, 2026
Institute for Jewish Studies
Jungiusstraße 11, 20355 Hamburg | Seminar Room C319
Monday, March 23, 2026
10:00–10:15 Greetings and Introduction
Ilaria Briata (Convenor | University of Hamburg)
10:15–12:15 Panel I. Bodies of Tradition
Emilio Valencia (University of Oxford)
Corporeal Horror and Communal Memory in the Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson
Leore Sachs-Shmueli (Bar Ilan University)
The Monster at the Deathbed: The Angel of Death in the Zohar and Reshit Ḥokhmah as a Pedagogy of Horror
Amalia Stulin (University of Hamburg)
Infested, Invaded, Bitten Under The Skin: Body, Soul, and The Fear of Evil Incarnated in Early Modern Musar Literature
Erga Heller (Kaye Academic College of Education)
The Demonic Languages in Contemporary Israeli Cross-Genre Horror-Fantasy-Mashup
12:15–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Panel II. Women of Horror
Supported by the Gender Equality Funds of the Department of Religions
Zehavit Stern (Emuna Academic College of Art and Education)
Lilith Reimagined: Unveiling the Femme Fatale in Jewish Horror Narratives
Olga Gershenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
The Malevolent Bride: The Innovation of Jewish Horror in Israeli Television Series
Emily Alice Katz (Author, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill)
Her Household Robed in Crimson. From Wonder-Tale to Feminist Horror.
15:00–15:30 Coffee Break
15:30–17:00 Panel III. Horror as Performance
Maximilian de Molière (University of Haifa)
Ritual Cosmic Horror: Kabbalistic Penitential Practices in Seventeenth-Century Italy
Netta Schramm (Ben-Gurion University)
Performing “Horror” in Contemporary Jewish Oral Sermons
Yair Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University)
Undead Seder: Role-Playing and Ritual Performance in If I Were a Lich, Man (online)
17:30–19:00 Dinner
19:30–21:00 Film Screening. Yiddish Horror Shorts
Abaton Kino | Allendeplatz 3, 20146 Hamburg
Introduced by Rebecca Margolis (Monash University, Australia)
In collaboration with Jüdischer Filmclub Hamburg | Institute for the History of the German Jews
Free entry
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
11:00–12:30 Panel IV. At the End of the World
Sebastiano Crestani (Università degli Studi di Padova)
Apocalyptic Horror: The Description of the Final Enemy Armilos in Jewish Eschatological Literature
Nimrod Baratz (University of Leipzig)
Monstrous Origins in Benjamin of Tudela’s 12th-century Book of Travels
Tamar Raphael (Author, Berlin)
Maximum – Beauty at the Threshold of Monstrosity in Dystopian Israel-Palestine
12:30–14:00 Lunch
14:00–15:30 Final Discussion
17:00–19:00 Round Table. Horror, Humor, Holocaust. New Directions in Jewish Visual Culture
Dean Gold (Filmmaker, Berlin)
Louis Kaplan (University of Toronto)
Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburg)
Rebecca Margolis (Monash University, Australia)
Registration: to attend the workshop and/or the round table, please send an email to ilaria.briata"AT"uni-hamburg.de