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

Chair: Patrick B. Koch (University of Hamburg)

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)| To Live All Day In Constant Dread: Body, Soul, and Yeṣer ha-Raʿ in Early Modern Musar

Erga Heller (Kaye Academic College of Education) | The Demonic Languages in Contemporary Israeli Cross-Genre Horror-Fantasy-Mashu

13:30–15:00     Panel II. Women of Horror Supported by the Gender Equality Funds of the Department of Religions

Chair: Ilaria Briata (University of Hamburg)

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.

15:30–17:00     Panel III. Horror as Performance

Chair: Ran Segev (University of Hamburg)

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)

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 | Link

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

11:00–12:30     Panel IV. At the End of the World

Chair: Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)

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

17:00–19:00     Round Table. Horror, Humor, Holocaust. New Directions in Jewish Visual Culture

Greetings: Giuseppe Veltri (Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies | University of Hamburg)

Moderator: Ilaria Briata (University of Hamburg)

Dean Gold (Filmmaker, Berlin)

Louis Kaplan (University of Toronto)

Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh)

Rebecca Margolis (Monash University, Australia)

Dowload the poster | PDF