Mohamed Amjahid and Max Czollek will engage in a conversation with guests in the U.S. about strategies for a more open, diverse and just society in Germany and the U.S. Thomas Mann Fellow and author Mohamed Amjahid and poet and publicist Max Czollek talk about political activism and diversity. In their work, they discuss the politics of history in the discourse on integration in both countries and raise the question: How is social diversity expressed in politics and art in both countries? What are counter-concepts to white, hegemonic culture?

In the next discussion on December 09, hosted by the Goethe-Institut Boston, Max Czollek and Mohamed Amjahid speak with an anthropologist and an award-winning podcaster about the role of Jewish and Muslim communities in contemporary society. Researcher Sultan Doughan and journalist/podcaster Rachael Cerrotti approach the subject from very different perspectives: one is scientific, one is personal.

Participants

Sultan Doughan is an anthropologist, who works on questions of citizenship, religious difference, racialization of Jewish and Muslim communities and political equality in contemporary Germany. She is particularly concerned with how genocide commemoration and the question of justice, transitional and racial, intersect and give rise to secular moral and ethical claims in public. Doughan has conducted field research among civil society organizations that were funded to combat Islamic extremism by teaching tolerance through the memory of the Holocaust. Dr. Doughan is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston University.

Rachael Cerrotti is an award-winning documentary photographer, writer, educator and producer. Her work focuses on exploring the intergenerational impact of memory and migration. For over a decade, Rachael has been retracing her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story and documenting the echoes of World War II. In the fall of 2019, she released a narrative podcast about this story titled We Share The Same Sky. It is now being taught in high school classrooms throughout the United States and abroad. Rachael has worked in over a dozen countries and has been published and featured by NPR, PRI’s The World, WBUR, GBH, amongst others and regularly presents to communities and classrooms worldwide. Rachael has a forthcoming memoir set to be published in the fall of 2021 and works as a creative producer with USC Shoah Foundation. She is currently based in Maine.

Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.

Max Czollek completed his doctorate studies at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Since 2009, Czollek has been a member of poetry collective G13, which has published books and organized lectures. In 2018, his essay Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) was published at Carl Hanser. His second essay, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Coping with the Present), was published in August 2020.

Live online webinar on December 09, 2020, 9 a.m. (PT). Please register here.