Lunchtime Lecture: Magda Teter on Early Modern German-Jewish History

Part 2 of LBI's 70th Anniversary Lecture Series

On June 11 at 12:00 PM EDT, Magda Teter will discuss early modern German-Jewish history.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

This lecture series will take place online.

About the Speaker:

Magda Teter is a Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2005), Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation (2011), Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (2023), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her essays have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Public Seminar, the JTA, and others. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Ronald Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Her new book, Blood Libels, Hostile Archives: Reclaiming Interrupted Jewish Lives was published in April 2025. Teter has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, HF Guggenheim Foundation, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Cullman Center at the NYPL, the NEH, and others. She is currently the President of the American Academy of Jewish Research.