Dialogue and Discourse

The Gertrude and David Fogelson Lecture

Learn more about the Jewish Museum’s special exhibition Modernity and Opulence: Women of the Wiener Werkstätte (on view through November 15, 2026) through this conversation with Professors Elana Shapira, lecturer at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Lisa Silverman, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Together they will focus on the role of Jewish women and patrons in supporting the growth and success of the workshop from its founding in turn of the century Austria.

Tickets: $14 General; $10 Students, Seniors, and Jewish Museum members
Doors open at 6 pm; Includes Museum Admission

About the speakers:

Lisa Silverman is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She specializes in modern German and Austrian Jewish cultural history, with a focus on gender, visual culture, and antisemitism. Her latest monograph is The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust (Oxford, 2025), and is also author of Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford, 2012) and co-author with Daniel H. Magilow of Holocaust Representations in History: an Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015; 2nd ed. 2019). She serves as Contributing Editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Vice-Chair of the Academic Advisory Board for the Leo Baeck Institute – New York/Berlin, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute of Culture Studies.

Elana Shapira is a cultural and design historian and lecturer at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has organized and co-organized international symposiums and workshops on the topics of Austrian émigrés in the United States and in Britain, the cultural legacy of Viennese modernism, Jews and cultural identity in Central European modernism, and women artists, designers, architects, and patrons. She is the author of Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), co-edited anthologies including Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2017), as well as the edited anthologies including Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021).