"Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945" - by Marion Kaplan

Register in advance for this webinar: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_d4dD4INpSLyGtgTxOqbk9g
 

Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945 (Yale University Press, 2020) depicts the travails of refugees escaping Nazi Europe and awaiting their fate in Portugal.  Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee existence, the book highlights refugees' feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, admitted tens of thousands of Jews fleeing westward but set his secret police on those who did not move on quickly. Yet Portugal’s people left a lasting impression on refugees as caring and generous. Most refugees in Portugal showed strength and stamina as they faced unimagined challenges. For the refugees, Lisbon emerged as a site of temporality and transition, a “no-man’s-land” between a painful past and a hopeful future. Paying careful attention to the words of refugees in Portugal may help us to understand Jewish heartbreak and perseverance in the 1940s and also to listen compassionately to refugees’ stories in our own times.
 

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991), Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998), and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore, 2011). 
 

Debórah Dwork is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Ralph Bunche Institute, The Graduate Center – CUNY. She served as the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Internationally renowned for several award-winning books, including Children With A Star; Auschwitz; and Flight from the Reich, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field.
 

David Hernández is Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. An interdisciplinary scholar, with a doctorate in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley, his research focuses on immigration enforcement, the U.S. detention regime, in particular. He is completing a book on this institution titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship for the University of California Press.
 

Joel Wolfe is Professor of Modern Latin American History at UMass Amherst. His is the author of Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the Rise of Brazil’s Industrial Working Class (Duke 1993) and Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity (Oxford 2010). He is writing The Global Twenties: Work, Life, and Trade in the Western Hemisphere in the 1920s and Brazil: An Incomplete Nation.