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
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-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
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.
15:00–15:30 Coffee Break
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)
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 | 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
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
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)
Registration: to attend the workshop and/or the round table, please send an email to ilaria.briata"AT"uni-hamburg.de
Download the poster | PDF