Wagnis, Mut, Verantwortung – Vortrags- und Diskussionsreihe 2025/26

Mut und Haltung: Jüdische Museumsarbeit in der Gegenwart

The massacre in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 had far-reaching consequences. In the months that followed, anti-Semitic incidents rose sharply worldwide and remain much higher than in previous years. Jewish museums in Europe had to increase their security measures, realign their programmes and strengthen their resilience, including the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. How is the museum team dealing with the increasing anti-Semitic and historical revisionist statements? In view of the increasing polarisation in public debates on migration, the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and racism, and the war in Israel and Gaza, how can it continue to be a place for nuanced discussions and debates? How does the Jewish Museum counter rising anti-Semitism and racism in its educational and outreach work? And to what extent does the motto of its permanent exhibition, ‘We Are Now,’ still reflect its stance?

Prof. Dr Mirjam Wenzel
Mirjam Wenzel studied general and comparative literature, political science and theatre studies in Berlin and Tel Aviv. She completed her doctorate at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich on German-language Holocaust discourse in the 1960s. In her numerous writings, she has addressed issues of German-Jewish art and cultural history, such as cultural theory, aesthetics and museology, and the representation of the Holocaust in visual art, photography and film. From 2007 to 2015, as head of the media department, she was responsible for communicating Jewish history and culture in digital and print media at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Since 2016, Mirjam Wenzel has been director of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, which has since been fundamentally renovated and expanded. Since 2019, she has been teaching as an honorary professor at the Department of Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She is a member of several academic advisory boards, including the Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Federal Agency for Civic Education and the Foundation for the Sites of German Democracy. She is also the recipient of the 2024 Hessian Culture Prize.

Jan Tussing
Jan Tussing grew up in an intercultural environment. Influenced by his school education in Germany and France, his interdisciplinary studies in Great Britain and his love of writing, he found his home in electronic journalism. As a long-standing ARD correspondent in Great Britain, West Africa and the USA, he got to know the media landscape in all its diversity as an author, presenter and filmmaker.

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