Donderdag 27 november 2025 om 20.00 uur
Michal Govrin | Auteur, dichter en theaterregisseur, Israël
Lezing in het Engels.
Lezing in lokaal R.013, Rodestraat 14,
2000 Antwerpen
Deelname is gratis.
Inschrijven per e-mail: ijs@uantwerpen.be.
This volume introduces a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance, shaped by a four-year interdisciplinary project at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Gathering Shoah survivors alongside second- and third-generation descendants, researchers, and artists, the group sought to reframe Holocaust memory within today’s global, cultural, psychological, and political landscape-eighty years after the liberation of the camps.
But There Was Love (Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, De Gruyter-Brill 2025) challenges the dominant narrative that has long centered Jewish victimhood as the primary lens through which the Shoah is remembered. Instead, it highlights the resilience, resistance, and ethical agency of women, men, and children during the genocide-asserting these as essential expressions of human dignity in the face of systematic dehumanization and extermination.
The book further questions the Western sacrificial connotations embedded in the term “Holocaust” and affirms the use of Shoah, aligning with the victims’ own perceptions. It explores how shifting the focus of remembrance from victimhood to human resistance and resilience supports a call for an active mode of remembrance - to remember with responsibility - that confronts our present time with profound ethical challenges.
As the era of living testimony draws to a close, But There Was Love aspires to contribute to a worldwide recognition that the Shoah, as a formative event of Western civilization, should pave our way for responsibly re-empowering the decree “Never Again Is Now.”
Michal Govrin is an acclaimed Israeli author, poet, and theater director. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a Zionist pioneer, she studied Comparative Literature and Theater at Tel Aviv University and earned her doctorate in theater and religious studies from the University of Paris VIII. She currently is a researcher at the Hartman and Van Leer institutes in Jerusalem. Govrin has published award-winning novels, poetry, and essays, and her work has been translated into numerous languages. In 2010 Govrin was chosen by the French Salon du Livre as one of the thirty authors that have left a mark on world literature. In 2013 she was awarded the title of chevalier by the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Alongside her literary achievements, she has directed theater across Israel and co-founded the Experimental Jewish Theater. As part of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Govrin founded and directed the multi-disciplinary research group ‘Transmitted Memory and Fiction’. She is co-editor of But There Was Love – Shaping the Memory of the Shoah (De Gruyter-Brill, 2025), a volume proposing a new paradigm for Shoah remembrance in today’s cultural and political reality.