Jacob Robinson Institute

Between the individual and the group: minority rights in interwar Estonia This article revisits theoretical debates over group rights and their impact on the individual in a democratic setting by looking at the Estonian example of collective minority self-government in t...

Dr. @timoaava.bsky.social has published in the Journal of Baltic Studies! "Between the individual and the group: minority rights in interwar Estonia" examines German and Jewish communities navigating collective rights & individual freedoms under 1925 cultural autonomy law.
📖 doi.org/10.1080/0162...

📖We're thrilled to share a new article by Prof. Rotem Giladi
@rgiladi.bsky.social: “Flogging Jack Nafte: Corporal Punishment, Imperial Assimilation, and Jewish Whiteness in Pre-Apartheid South Africa” in @jich.bsky.social.

🔗For the full #openaccess article:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

📖 New article by Dr. Yehudit Dori Deston examines how punishment severity shapes judicial reasoning and evidentiary standards, using the 1986 Ivan Demjanjuk trial and Israeli legislation on Nazi war criminals to assess capital punishment in a democracy.

Full article:
law.tau.ac.il/sites/law.ta...

Happy Rosh Hashana and Chag Sameach from all of us at the Jacob Robinson Institute! 🍎🍯

We wish you and your family a better year filled with peace, health and prosperity.

May all our hostages return safely home soon.🎗️

More details about the panel are available here: t.ly/Y8j93

We’re proud to announce that @arethmann.bsky.social, our Visiting Postdoc, will present at #TheGSA2025. Her talk on Hannah Arendt and the Auschwitz Trials reconsiders the “banality of evil,” the controversies it sparked, and its continued relevance for questions of responsibility and jurisdiction.

🎓Congrats to Dor Correct on completing his M.A.! His thesis, “The Jurist Emil von Hofmannsthal (1884-1971): A Scientific-Intellectual Biography”, reconstructs the legacy of the Austrian-Jewish jurist, focusing on his advocacy for marginalized groups, especially in minority rights & matrimonial law.

📸 Highlights from the international workshop “Beyond Wiedergutmachung: Unravelling the Legacies of the 1952 Holocaust Reparations Agreement” which took place in Sde-Boker.

Our fellows, Dr. Tom Eshed (@tomeshed.bsky.social) and Dr. Eran Shlomi, will present at the AIS 2025, Israel and the International Community: Challenges and Prospects, taking place at the University of Haifa from September 8–10, 2025.

Full conference program: robinson.huji.ac.il/sites/defaul...

We partnered with the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion Uni and the Weidenfeld Institute at the Uni of Sussex, for the intl workshop “Beyond Wiedergutmachung: Unravelling the Legacies of the 1952 Holocaust Reparations Agreement.”

Full Program:
robinson.huji.ac.il/sites/defaul...

Our PhD fellow, Idan Frisher, has been awarded the 2025 Prize of the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry for his M.A. thesis, “Restitution of Property to Jews and Non-Jews in Post-Communist Lithuania: Deserving and Undeserving Victims.” Congratulations, Idan! 🎉

🎓 Congratulations to Asaf Segal Doron on completing his M.A.! His excellent thesis, “Between Tradition and Modernity: Equality Before the Law at the 1861 Hungarian High Judge Conference”, explores nineteenth-century debates on legal equality. Well done, Asaf!

Congratulations to Anne Rethmann (@arethmann.bsky.social)!
Our Visiting PhD Fellow has been awarded her doctorate summa cum laude from @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social. From Oct 2025, she joins the Martin Buber Society at @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social as a postdoctoral fellow.

Best of luck Anne! ⭐

Dr. Jonathan Grossman and Dr. Tom Eshed (@tomeshed.bsky.social), will present their work at the upcoming 19th World Congress of Jewish Studies, taking place at the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus from August 4–8, 2025. Full program: robinson.huji.ac.il/sites/defaul...

We are proud to announce that our director, Prof. Dan Diner, will be awarded the 2025 Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose by the German Academy for Language and Literature. The Institute extends its warmest congratulations to Prof. Diner on this exceptional recognition.

Our MA student Asaf Segal Doron presented his research "Between Tradition and Modernity: Equality Before the Law at the 1861 Hungarian High Judge Conference" at the 2025 CEH-C in the University of Vienna! 🇦🇹

Proud of you Asaf! 👏

For the full poster: robinson.huji.ac.il/sites/defaul...

We are pleased to announce that our Deputy Director Dr. Iris Nachum, has been appointed to the Academic Advisory Board of the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture - Simon Dubnow. Best of luck in this important role Dr. Nachum!
@dubnow.bsky.social @alfredlandecker.bsky.social

Extraterritorial militarism: emigrants as soldiers in Israel - Comparative Migration Studies Militarism is a discourse that glorifies soldiers and treats military service as a key component of full citizenship. This article contends that states can project militaristic discourse onto citizens...

🎉 Congratulations to our Dr. Jonathan Grossman on the publication of his new article, "Extraterritorial Militarism: Emigrants as Soldiers in Israel", in Comparative Migration Studies! The article is free to read, download, and cite via open access 🌟
doi.org/10.1186/s408...

Dr. Jonathan Grossman will speak at the at the 28th World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in Seoul, July 12–16, on “Transnational Militarism: Seeing Citizens Abroad as Past and Future Soldiers.”

Best of luck, Jonathan!

For more details: wc2025.ipsa.org/wc/home

We’re pleased to share that our colleagues @tomeshed.bsky.social and @arethmann.bsky.social
will take part in the Antisemitism Research Workshop (July 13–14), hosted by the Van Leer Institute, in collaboration with the Vidal Sassoon Center(HUJI) and the Stephen Roth Institute (TAU).
See: t.ly/KqOn5

Prof. Rotem Giladi will present “Emancipatory Flogging: Jewish Bodies, Corporal Punishment, and the Empire's Political Authority” at the “Legal Histories of Empire: Empires in Touch” conference.

📍 U of Toronto | 10-12.7.2025
🔗 www.crimsl.utoronto.ca/events/legal...

📸 Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

We’re excited to announce that Dr. Tom Eshed has received the Tereza Levinger Prize from the Strochlitz Institute of Holocaust Research at the University of Haifa, for his research on Holocaust commemoration in Israeli cultural diplomacy.
Congratulations, Tom! 🎉

We're excited to welcome Adan Ershied as an Affiliated PhD Fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute! 🎉 A doctoral candidate in law at the Hebrew University, Adan researches the legal construction of collective rights and promotes diversity in academia. Welcome, Adan!

Yesterday, in honor of The Hebrew University’s centennial, Dr. Eran Shlomi led us on a unique historical tour of Mount Scopus! we visited the Law Faculty exhibition, Shapell Building, Rothberg Amphitheater, Ussishkin & Pinsker’s tombs, and the Bentwich Cemetery. Thank you Eran! 🗺️

The conference report on our symposium “Human Rights in Troubled Times” is now published on HSozKult and available on our website.
Many thanks to @arethmann.bsky.social for the great organization, and to all speakers and participants for their thoughtful contributions!
Read here bit.ly/4dTPVzk

🎉 New article by our own Dr. Jonathan Grossman, with Jason Silverman & Yehonatan Abramson: "‘It’s All Personal’: State-led Mobilisation of Diaspora Individuals", on how Israel engaged U.S. Jewish figures in tailored, trust-based diaspora diplomacy.

🔗 doi.org/10.1177/1369...

We’re happy to share that the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights is now also on BlueSky! 🎉 Follow us for updates on our research, events, and publications.