All webinar events hosted by the IHGMS are recorded and made available to the public via our YouTube channel.
Fall 2024
Spring 2024
Fall 2023
A discussion of the ghetto memoir (1946) and testimony of one of the most important Yiddish poets to emerge from the Holocaust. Why was the memoir ignored by critics and even by the author himself for so long? Why should we look anew at early post-liberation efforts to document events and establish a foundation for collective memory?
Join our distinguished panel of literary critics, translators, and historians as they assess Sutzkever's text, available for the first time in an award-winning English translation. Harriet Murav, Jeffrey Grossman, and Laura Jockusch will discuss the book. Justin Cammy will respond, and Adi Gordon will moderate.
October 17th 2023 4:30pm
The English Department (co-sponsored by IHGMS) is delighted to present award-winning author Jonny Steinberg, who will talk on his book, Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.
This double biography of Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Nelson Mandela has been published to widespread acclaim for its extraordinary account of their complex personal and political relationship.
The event will take place on Tuesday, October 17th, 4.30 pm, in the Old Chapel, UMass. Full details are on the poster below; Steinberg will also be in conversation with Stephen Clingman, Distinguished University Professor, English Department.
November 16th 2023 1:00pm
Fascism in America: Past and Present
Amid the increasingly dire consequences of the divisions in the U.S, and the current global instability, what might we gain from once again defining fascism as a threat not only in the past but also in the present and future? What past iterations of fascism are being revived, and by whom? What are the signs that fascism is once again a force to be reckoned with? What forms has fascism taken in the past, and what forms might it take in the immediate future of America? What implications does this have for mobilizing effective responses and countermeasures to fascist tendencies, practices, or policies? Join a discussion of these topics with Gavriel Rosenfeld, Janet Ward, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, moderated by Karen Remmler.
Spring 2023
In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, leading Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to publish a popular Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world. Soon after the "Algemeyne entsiklopedye" (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. In a recent book The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Barry Trachtenberg has traced this fascinating story. He and Mindl Cohen, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, will be in conversation about his book and the general themes it raises. This conversation will be moderated by Alon Confino, Director of the IHGMS.
Madeleine Cohen is Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Mount Holyoke College.
Barry Trachtenberg is the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Alon Confino is Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, and Director of the IHGMS, at UMass Amherst.
THURSDAY, MAY 4TH, 5:00 PM
Screening and Discussion: Filming the Gulag with Kristian Feigelson moderated by Olga Gershenson
Very few films have examined the history and visual reality of the Gulag labor camps, as all concrete traces of the sites have been erased. This event is an opportunity to see and discuss a rare film SLONproduced by the GPU, the Soviet Secret Police, in 1927 at the Solovki Islands labor camp, which served as a model for the Soviet labor camp system.
Kristian Feigelson is a sociologist and Professor of Film studies at the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle/Ircav. Filming the Gulag is a part of a research project, supported by the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle, presented at conferences and screenings across the globe.
Co-sponsored by Russian, Eurasian and Polish Studies and Film Studies programs, the Institute of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, The DEFA Film Library, and the Department of History.
Fall 2022
Thursday, September 22, 2022, 1:00PM (ET) | 20:00 (Jerusalem)
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their “Encounters” annual series: “Aftermaths”
A conversation with Jeffrey Veidlinger on his book
In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York, 2021)
In In the Midst of Civilized Europe, Jeffrey Veidlinger explores the largely-forgotten anti-Jewish pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution. This is the first full depiction of the pogroms drawing upon long-neglected archival material. More than a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine in hundreds of separate incidents. Veidlinger argues that the pogroms were a defining moment of the twentieth century and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. In conversation with Veidlinger will be Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.
Friday, October 7, from 9:00am-5:00pm
(at the Old Chapel of UMass Amherst)
The Legacy of Jules Chametzky: Honoring the Intellect, Fostering Justice and Equality
A day-long celebration of the life and work of Jules Chametzky, founding editor of the Massachusetts Review, early president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, first director of UMass’s Interdisciplinary Studies Institute, and co-signatory at the founding of the national Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. In the morning, friends and family will offer their memories, and an afternoon symposium will include an assortment of well-known writers and scholar, among them Doug Anderson, Nia Imara, Hilene Flanzbaum, Jacqueline Loss, Robin McLean, and J. Michael Terry. Keynote addresses will be given by William A. Darity, Jr. and Werner Sollors.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022, 1:00PM (ET) | 19:00 (Jerusalem)
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their “Encounters” annual series: “Aftermaths”
A conversation with Roni Mikel-Arieli on her book
Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy, 1948-1994 (Berlin, 2022)
Roni Mikel-Arieli’s book, Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State, explores how the racially managed society of Apartheid South Africa commemorated the racial destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book views South African society as an arena of conflict between the interests and identities of varied groups: from South African Jewry to other sections on South Africa’s political and social spectrum. The book focuses on white perceptions of the Holocaust, as well as investigates the role of Holocaust memory in the anti-Apartheid struggle. In conversation with Mikel-Arieli will be Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg.
Dr. Roni Mikel-Arieli is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
November 15-16, 2022
The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century – Thirty Years after Weiter Leben
On the occasion of the publication of a new volume of essays, entitled The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century (edited by Mark H. Gelber, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), a one-day International Symposium to be held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will honor the memory of Ruth Klüger -- Holocaust survivor, scholar, teacher, author, essayist, poet, and feminist. The lecturers will take this opportunity to assess her role in, and specific contribution to, several discussions concerning fields and perspectives which her writings and career helped to bring into focus critically. These include: the child survivor, forced labor, poetry during and after the Shoa, scholarly autobiography of the Shoa, critique of the memory culture of the Shoa, feminist perspectives and the feminist contribution to Holocaust historiography, beginning anew after the Shoa and far from Europe, the end (or nearing the end) of the Auschwitz century, among others.
Ruth Klüger (1931 – 2020) passed away on October 5, 2020 in the U.S. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt as a child, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoa together with her mother. After living in Germany for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities, including Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, the University of Kansas, the University of Virginia, University of California, Irvine, and Princeton University. She finished her distinguished academic career at the University of California, Irvine. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Göttingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben (1992), was a major bestseller and highly regarded autobiographical account, which was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Klüger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions. In 2022, the city of Vienna officially named a square in the neighborhood where she grew up “Ruth Klueger -Platz.”
Wednesday, November 30, 2022, 1:00PM (ET) | 20:00 (Jerusalem)
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their “Encounters” annual series: “Aftermaths”
A conversation with Yechiel Weizman on his book
Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces after the Holocaust (Ithaca, 2022)
In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust. He asks how postwar Polish society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources and anthropological field work, the book uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of Poland’s material Jewish remnants and shows how their presence became the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation. Leading the conversation with Weizman will be Monika Rice, and joining them will be Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg.
Yechiel Weizman is a lecturer at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Monika Rice is the Robert Weiner and Ilan Peleg Scholar in Jewish Studies, and Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Russian and East European Studies at Lafayette College.
Tuesday, December 13, 2022, 1:00PM (EDT)
Antisemitism has gained of late power and momentum in the United States in ways that most people, Jews and non Jews, could not have imagined possible. Implicit and explicit approval of antisemitism is tolerated or supported now by people with serious power. At the same time, there are fierce debates, particularly among Jews, about what exactly constitutes antisemitism. At the center of these debates are Zionism and Israel and Palestine: when does critique of Israel or Zionism cross the line into antisemitism? These two phenomena commingle to characterize the historical condition of antisemitism in today’s American society. Discussing these topics will be Peter Beinart, Lila Corwin Berman, and Jill Jacobs in a roundtable moderated by Alon Confino.
Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science, City University of New York and editor at large of Jewish Currents.
Lila Corwin Berman is Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History, and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History, Temple University.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.
Alon Confino is Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, and Director of the IHGMS, UMass Amherst.
Spring 2022
January 27, 2022, 5:00PM (EST)
International Holocaust Remembrance Day event:
A conversation with Avinoam Patt and Anna Shternshis on Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust, edited by David Slucki, Gabriel Finder, and Avinoam Patt
What is at stake in deploying humor in representing the Holocaust? Laughter After brilliantly explores this fundamental topic by asking: what are the boundaries between humor and the Holocaust, if any? What are the ethical limits of deploying humor about the Holocaust, if any? What was the purpose of using humor to give meaning to the tragedy? How did Jews utilize humor as a coping mechanism both during and after the Holocaust? The book analyzes a wide-breadth of Holocaust related humor—in literature, television, film, Yiddish and Jewish jokes, and other representations. Without survivors to tell their stories, how will future generations understand, relate to, and even find humor in the Holocaust? Conversing with Patt and Shternshis will be Alon Confino.
Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor of Yiddish studies and Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Avinoam J. Patt is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut.
March 8, 2022, 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
“Encounters”
The IHGMS and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia
A Conversation with Raef Zreik on the Arab intellectuals’ letter condemning antisemitism and rejecting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism
In November 2020, a group of 122 Arab scholars, journalists, and intellectuals published an unprecedented open letter – in English, German, Hebrew, Arabic, and French – unconditionally condemning antisemitism, while at the same time vehemently rejecting the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. The letter states:
“In recent years, the fight against antisemitism has been increasingly instrumentalized by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to delegitimize the Palestinian cause and silence defenders of Palestinian rights. Diverting the necessary struggle against antisemitism to serve such an agenda threatens to debase this struggle and hence to discredit and weaken it.”
Dr. Raef Zreik was among the initiators and drafters of this letter. In this encounter he will elaborate on his views about antisemitism, the fight against it, and it’s political instrumentalization within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Dr. Raef Zreik is co-director of the Minerva Center for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University, an Associate Professor at Ono Academic College, and a senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. His fields of interest include legal and political theory, citizenship and identity, and legal interpretation.
April 5, 2022, 1:00PM (EDT) / 20:00 (Israel time)
“Encounters”
The IHGMS and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia
A conversation with Claudrena Harold on When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras
Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena Harold's fascinating book When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois, 2020) illustrates the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves. Our conversation focuses on African-American identity and empowerment, and on anti-Black racism and bigotry by talking about and listening to the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music. Some of the key questions we shall discuss are: What were the major political transformations in gospel music between 1968 and 1994? In what ways were gospel artists shaped by larger political developments in the United States? And how did the end of de jure segregation alter the relationship between African American gospel artists and the predominantly white Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry?
Claudrena Harold is Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
April 29-30, 2022
International Workshop | Genealogies of Self-Reflection
This workshop focuses on the participants’ various forms of memoir writing. The intention is to create a space to experiment with writing outside of the box, particularly related to family genealogies in which, at times, collective and subjective forms of trauma intermingle.<
May 10, 2022, 1:00PM (EDT) / 20:00 (Israel time)
“Encounters”
The IHGMS and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia
A conversation with Magda Teter on Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth
Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged for the first time in 1144 and has continued since. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” Magda Teter’s new book Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth explored the history of this myth. Our conversation will focus on how the blood libel was internalized throughout the centuries, and why, how it affected Jews and Christians, and what are the meanings of it. Of special importance is the topic of antisemitism as it emerges from the book: what it was and is, and how to understand it today? What are the relations between antisemitsm and racism, which is Teter’s new book project?
Magda Teter is Professor of History and Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University.
May 30, 2022 – June 1, 2022
International Workshop | Defining Antisemitism between History and Politics
Defining antisemitism has become a battleground. Advocates and opponents of contending definitions confront one another in the printed press, online, and in social media. This workshop aims to provide a space for scholars from different disciplines to examine the current debate over definitions of antisemitism and to explore what is at stake in this debate. The workshop will take place at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and is supported by seven institutions from Israel, the UK, and the USA.
Academic Committee: Prof. Alon Confino, Prof. Manuela Consonni, Prof. David Feldman, Prof. Amos Goldberg, Prof. Shai Lavi, Prof Amos Morris-Reich, Dr. Dafna Schreiber
Fall 2021
Tuesday, September 14, 2021, 5:00PM (EDT)
A panel discussion on Aviva Ben-Ur’s “Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825”
Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed liberties and owned plantations and slaves. Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. The Jewish experience in Suriname was thus marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.
Aviva Ben-Ur is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass Amherst specializing in Atlantic Jewish history, slavery studies, and the Ottoman diaspora. She is the author of, among others, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York University Press, 2009).
Marjoleine Kars is Professor of Early American and Atlantic slavery and of the Age of Revolution at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She recently published Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: The New Press, 2020) about a remarkably successful rebellion of enslaved people in Dutch Berbice (now Guyana) in 1763-1764.
Stanley Mirvis is Assistant Professor of history and the Harold and Jean Grossman Chair of Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. His most recent book is The Jews of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition (Yale University Press, 2020), a study of last will and testaments exploring the relationship between colonial and metropolitan Jews and the nature of Jewish creolization in the British West Indies.
This event is co-sponsored by the department of Judiac and Near Eastern Studies at UMass Amherst.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 1:00PM (EDT)
“Encounters”
The IHGMS and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia
A conversation with A. Dirk Moses on his book “The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression”
Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the “crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide contends that this violence is the consequence of ‘permanent security’ imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.
A. Dirk Moses is Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written extensively about Germany, genocide, and global history.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021, at 12:00PM (EST)
The Kristallnacht Memorial Event:
A panel discussion on Angelika Bammer’s “Born After: Reckoning with the German Past”
What do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? Born After reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt us are shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Angelika Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar.
Angelika Bammer is Professor of Comparative Literature and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Emory University. She is the author of, among others, The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Aleida Assmann is Professor of English and Literary Studies Emerita at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Her work has focused on cultural anthropology and cultural and communicative Memory.
Roger Frie is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author most recently of the award-winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Tuesday, November 16, 2021, at 1:00PM (EST) / 20:00 (Israel time)
The IHGMS and the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem present their annual series:
“Encounters: Conversations on Racism, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia"
A Conversation with Sol Goldberg and Scott Ury on their co-edited volume (together with Kalman Weiser) Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism
What is antisemitism past and present and how to define it has become a contested historical and political topic in the last few years. Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism, edited by Sol Goldberg, Scott Ury, and Kalman Weiser attempts to enhance our understanding of the phenomena by being both intellectually challenging and methodologically innovative. Recognizing that antisemitism's manifestations are diverse and its causes many, the volume explores the phenomenon's complexity through the concepts most salient to its comprehension in the present as well as the past. The volume's twenty-one concepts include, among others, Gender, Zionism, orientalism, emancipation, and postcolonialism. Leading the conversation with Goldberg and Ury is Stefanie Schuler-Springorum. She will highlight, among others, how the turn to key concepts not only disrupts larger, chronological narratives that often frame the study of antisemitism, but also brings the phenomenon into conversation with a range of other fields and disciplines.
Sol Goldberg is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Scott Ury is Senior Lecturer in Tel Aviv University's Department of Jewish History where he is also Director of the Eva and Marc Besen Institute for the Study of Historical Consciousness and Senior Editor of the journal History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past.
Stefanie Schuler-Springorum is Historian and Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin as well as member of the Board of Directors of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg.
Monday, November 29, 2021, 5:00PM (EST)
A panel discussion on Thomas Kohut’s "Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past”
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past considers the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by fields of study including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology. The book seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Thomas Kohut argues that historians need to be aware of their observational position, of when they are empathizing and when they are not. Indeed, Kohut advocates for the deliberate, self-reflective use of empathy as a legitimate and important mode of historical inquiry.
Thomas Kohut is the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Professor of History at Williams College in Massachusetts. A historian with psychoanalytic training, he has published, among others, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2012). He is currently a member of the Council of Scholars, which advises the Erikson Institute at Riggs. He is also President of the Board of the Freud Foundation US.
Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director of the Erikson Institute for Education, Research, and Advocacy of the Austen Riggs Center. A board-certified clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst, Dr. Tillman is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and a Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance of Harvard Medical School.
Frank Biess is Professor of Modern European History with an emphasis on 20th Century Germany at the University of California, San Deigo. His first book, Homecoming. Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, 2006) explored the ways in which both German societies coped with the ongoing legacies of war and defeat.
Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Her newest book is Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45 (Yale University Press, 2020).
Thursday, December 9, 2021, 12:00PM (EST)
A panel discussion on Shay Hazkani’s “Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War”
In 1948 in Palestine, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With Dear Palestine, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home. Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 War through these letters. Through two narratives—the official and unofficial, the propaganda and the personal letters—Dear Palestine reveals the fissures between sanctioned nationalism and individual identity.
Shay Hazkani is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. In his research and teachings, he focuses on the interactions between elites and non-elites, and how ideas which emanate from elites and state institutions were transformed and subverted as they make their way to the reflections and conduct of ordinary people.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. Among her books is Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002.
Laila Parsons is Professor of modern Middle East history at McGill University. Her most recent book, The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914–1948 (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2016), was the recipient of the 2017 Palestine Book Award and the Society for Military History’s 2017 Distinguished Book Award. She is currently writing a book on the British occupation of Palestine, 1917-1948.
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her doctorate at Tel Aviv University and completed research posts at Columbia, New York, Brown, and Tufts Universities. Her research focuses on the political and historical sociology of Israeli and Palestinian societies. She explores the interactions between different aspects of Zionist history and ideology vis-à-vis liberal and social ideologies, with an emphasis on settler colonialism, memory, and gender.
Spring 2021
Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 5:00-6:30PM
International Holocaust Remembrance Day Event
A conversation with David Slucki on his book Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019).
With: David Slucki, Loti Smorgon Associate Professor in Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; and Alon Confino, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, and Director of the IHGMS, UMass Amherst.
In 1978, Jakub Slucki passed away peacefully in his sleep at the age of seventy-seven. A Holocaust survivor whose first wife and two sons had been murdered at the Nazi death camp in Chelmno, Poland, Jakub had lived a turbulent life. Just over thirty-seven years later, his son Charles died of a heart attack. David Slucki’s Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons tells the story of his father and his grandfather, and the grave legacy that they each passed on to him. This is a story about the Holocaust and its aftermath, about absence and the scars that never heal, and about fathers and sons and what it means to raise young men. David Slucki and Alon Confino will discuss the memoir and the issues raised in its writing.
Tuesday, February 9, 2021, 1:00-2:30PM
A conversation on Leona Toker’s new book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana University Press, 2019).
With: Leona Toker, Professor of English, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Naomi Mandel, Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in American Studies in the Department of English, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Amos Goldberg, Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Leona Toker's book, Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps, performs an intercontexual reading, one against each other, of narratives and texts documenting writers' experiences of repression under the Soviet and the Nazi regimes. Naomi Mandel and Amos Goldberg will discuss with Toker the twofold analysis she presents in her book: what narrative qualities have emerged in the light of the unique historical background of each of these regimes - the similarities and differences; how the prominent features of one text shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other; and what is the new meaning obtained during the double reading that takes place during the passage of time.
“Encounters”: this event is held simultaneously in Amherst and Jerusalem in collaboration with the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Thursday, February 11, 2021, 5:00-6:30PM
A panel discussion on Rachel Havrelocks’ new book The Joshua Generation: Israeli Occupation and the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2020).
With: Rachel Havrelock, Associate Professor of English, the University of Illinois at Chicago; Arie Dubnov, Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies and Associate Professor of History, George Washington University; and Jaqueline Vayntrub, Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, Yale Divinity School.
No biblical text has been more central to the politics of modern Israel than the book of Joshua, depicting the march of the ancient Israelites into Canaan, describing how they subjugated and massacred the indigenous peoples. The Joshua Generation examines the book’s centrality to the Israeli occupation today, revealing why nationalist longing and social reality are tragically out of sync in the Promised Land. At the center of Rachel Havrelock’s book is the question, how a controversial Biblical tale of conquest and genocide became a founding story of modern Israel.
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 1:00PM
A talk by Kerry Wallach,Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
“Rahel Szalit-Marcus as Transnational Jewish Artist and Refugee”
Forgotten artist and illustrator Rahel Szalit-Marcus (1888-1942) was born in an East European shtetl and driven westward by the quest for personal and artistic freedom. After escaping Germany for France in 1933, she ultimately perished at Auschwitz; most of her works were destroyed or lost. Through a close look at some of her surviving works, this talk explores Szalit's engagement with art movements in Berlin and Paris as well as her status as a Jewish woman émigré and refugee.
This event is held in collaboration with the German & Scandinavian Studies Department at UMass Amherst. For more information, please email: Mariana Ivanova (@email) or Jonathan Skolnik (@email).
Thursday, February 25, 2021, 4:30-6:00PM
A round table discussion on Advancing Holocaust Studies, the new edited volume by Carol Rittner and John Roth (Routledge, 2020).
With: Dr. Carol Rittner, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Holocaust & Genocide Studies and the Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University, John K. Roth; Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College; Debórah Dwork, Founding Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, the Graduate Center – CUNY; Lisa Leff, Director, the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Professor of History at American University; and James Young, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the IHGMS at UMass Amherst.
The growing field of Holocaust Studies confronts a world wracked by antisemitism, immigration and refugee crises, human rights abuses, mass atrocity crimes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and environmental degradation. What does it mean to advance Holocaust Studies in such dire straits? Vast resources support study and memorialization of the Holocaust. What assumptions govern that investment? What are its major successes and failures, challenges and prospects? The book Advancing Holocaust Studies poses these questions and provides answers by scholars who grapple with those tough issues.
This event is organized and held in collaboration with the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center as well as the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG) Program at Stockton University.
Tuesday, March 9, 2021, 1:00-2:30PM
A conversation on Anna Hájková’s new book The Last Ghetto:
An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020).
With: Anna Hájková, Associate Professor of modern European continental history, the University of Warwick; and Amos Goldberg, Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Anna Hájková examines the prisoner society in the Theresienstadt ghetto using the same analytical tools as for other historical events. In this way, she argues, the prison societies that developed during the Holocaust can be best understood. Her book, The Last Ghetto, offers a new, modern history of Theresienstadt from a transnational, cultural, and social lens. Liberated the day after the end of World War II, Theresienstadt was literally “The Last Ghetto.” Amos Goldberg and Anna Hájková will discuss authority, responsibility, boundaries, and belonging, as they are revealed in the extreme conditions of the social hierarchy in the ghetto, and how these ultimately influenced the fate of the prisoner.
“Encounters”: this event is held simultaneously in Amherst and Jerusalem in collaboration with the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Thursday, March 25, 2021, 5:00-6:30PM
"Mapping Genocide and the Refugee Experience during the Great War in the Middle East", by Michelle Tusan
With: Michelle Tusan, Professor of History, the University of Nevada; Bedross Der Matossian, Hymen Rosenberg Professor of Judaic Studies, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Melanie S. Tanielian, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of Armenian Studies, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
This panel explores relief work and refugee movement in and around the Ottoman Empire during World War I using interactive ARC-GIS mapping technology. Patterns found in the data gleaned from refugee memoirs, NGO archives, and military documents suggest that the reality of total war that shaped Allied strategies and humanitarian practice also shaped norms and conditions for dealing with displaced peoples. Michelle Tusan presents a series of georeferenced maps charting experiences of exile and return over time and space, which enables us to understand how people used aid, where they went and which groups survived. Bedross Der Matossian and Melanie S. Tanielian respond to Tusan’s paper and open up questions for discussion.
Thursday, April 8, 2021, 4:00-5:30PM
Special Event for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day
With: Terry Kurgan, an artist and writer based in Johannesburg, author of Everyone Is Present; and Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
A conversation between Terry Kurgan and Marianne Hirsch on Kurgan’s book Everyone is Present (Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2019), in which she uses diaries and photographs to tell her family’s Holocaust story. Terry Kurgan begins Everyone is Present with a family snapshot made by her Polish grandfather in 1939 on the eve of the war. Presenting this evocative image as a repository of multiple histories—public, private, domestic, familial, and generational—she sets off on a series of meditations on photography. What do photographs conceal, how do they mislead, what provocations do they contain? Her insights tell the story of her family across Europe as they flee, country by country, Nazi occupation until they reach Cape Town, South Africa.
Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 1:00-2:30PM
A conversation on Claudio Saunt’s new book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (Norton, 2020).
With: Claudio Saunt, Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia; and Barbara Krauthamer, Dean, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Professor of History, UMass Amherst.
In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic. Over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans die under the federal government policy, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homeland in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.
“Encounters”: this event is held simultaneously in Amherst and Jerusalem in collaboration with the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Fall 2020
Wednesday, September 23, 2020, 5:00pm (EST)
“Resistance and Rescue in History and Memory. Rethinking Opposition in Nazi Germany”
A panel discussion of the new book Lives Reclaimed. A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany by Mark Roseman
Lives Reclaimed. A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany (Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2019) tells the story of a little-known German left-wing group, based in the Ruhr, that survived the Nazi years and reached out during the Third Reich to assist Jews in the region. He analyzes the choices and challenges both sides faced as they negotiated dictatorship and Holocaust. It also pursues the group into the postwar period, in particular seeking to understand why they enjoyed so little resonance or recognition for their actions after 1945. Here Roseman has a larger story to tell, about the way the memory of rescue has come to occlude the experience of it.
Mark Roseman is Distinguished Professor of History, Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, Adjunct Professor in Germanic Studies at Indiana University. His anthology ÜberLeben im Dritten Reich. Handlungsspielräume von Juden und ihren Helfern will appear next year. He is general editor of the four volume Cambridge History of the Holocaust (in preparation).
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Associate Professor in Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent publications include (as co-editor), Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-1947 (2016); The Ethics of Seeing. Photography and Twentieth-Century German History (2018); as well as Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories (2018), a new edition and translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s writings.
Rebecca Wittmann is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She has recently edited Eichmann: The Man, the Trial, the Aftermath (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press) and is currently working on a project entitled Guilt and Shame through the Generations: Confronting the Past in Postwar Germany.
Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 5:00pm (EST)
“Will Trump Go?” A talk by Lawrence Douglas
Donald Trump is already trying to invalidate the 2020 elections in myriad ways. But how well equipped is our constitutional and legal system to deal with an electoral crisis? During this event, Constitutional Law expert Lawrence Douglas will discuss his book WILL HE GO?, which asks what would happen if Trump doesn’t concede this coming November. This scenario was only narrowly avoided during Bush V Gore, and in the hyper-partisan Washington of today, concession does not seem likely.
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, as well as a known writer for The Guardian. He is the prize-winning author of seven books, most recently WILL HE GO: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 (Grand Central Publishing, 2020).
Tuesday, October 6, 2020, 5:00pm (EST)
A panel discussion of the new book “Moses Mendelssohn’s Afterlives and the Invention of Modern Jewish Memory” by Martina Steer
Martina Steer, Abigail Gillman, and Michael Brenner discuss Moses Mendelssohn as a central figure for the cult of memory in modern Jewish societies. Posthumously, Mendelssohn became a paramount point of reference for Jewish culture and his memory was transmitted across generations, religious groups, and national borders from the late eighteenth century to the rise of National Socialism. Mendelssohn’s life was constructed and disputed across national borders as a paradigm of Jewish modernity. An entangled analysis of the agents of memory, multi-media memory practices, and his reception in Germany, Poland, and the United States sheds light on the dynamics and transnational connectivity of Jewish memory.
Martina Steer is Adjunct Professor of Modern Jewish history at the University of Vienna. She was a visiting fellow at various universities, among them New York University, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Wroclaw. She is currently working on a social and emotional history of Jewish women in Germany and Austria after 1945. Her latest book is Mendelssohn und seine Nachwelt. Eine Kulturgeschichte der jüdischen Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019).
Abigail Gillman is Professor of Hebrew, German and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. She is the author of Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and Schnitzler (Penn State Press, 2009) and A History of German Jewish Bible Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and director of the Center for Israel Studies at American University. His latest publications are In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2018) and as editor, and A History of Jews in Germany since 1945 (Indiana University Press 2018).
Wednesday, October 21, 2020, 5:00pm (EST)
A panel discussion of the new book: A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany by Monica Black
In the years after WWII, Germany was convulsed by a series of mass supernatural phenomena. Waves of apocalyptic rumors surged through the country. A messianic faith healer rose to extraordinary fame. Prayer groups performed exorcisms. Enormous crowds traveled to witness thousands of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder. Monica Black’s A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Holt, Henry & Company, Inc., 2020) argues that this surge of supernatural obsessions in the wake of an annihilationist war and the Holocaust stemmed from the unspoken guilt and shame of a nation remarkably silent about what was euphemistically called “the most recent past.” A Demon-Haunted Land offers a shadow history of the immediate post-1945 era, placing in full view the toxic mistrust, profound bitterness, and spiritual malaise that unfolded in postwar, post-Holocaust West Germany alongside the famed “economic miracle.”
Monica Black is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first book, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany, won the Wiener Library Ernst Fraenkel and Hans Rosenberg Prizes. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Central European History.
Ulrike Weckel is Professor of History at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen, Germany, specializing in the representations of the past in the media and among the public. Her research interests include postwar dealings with Germany’s Nazi past, gender history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, media history and audience reception. She is the author of Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart 2012).
Alexander C.T. Geppert is Associate Professor of History and European Studies at New York University, jointly appointed at NYU Shanghai, the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Department of History. Recent book publications include a trilogy on European astroculture, consisting of Imagining Outer Space (2nd edn, 2018), Limiting Outer Space (2018) and Militarizing Outer Space (2020).
Natalie Scholz is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Amsterdam. She works on the cultural history of the political in modern Europe (France and Germany) with a focus on symbolic representations and popular imaginations. Her current book project explores the political meanings of everyday objects in postwar West Germany.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 5:00pm (EST) - Kristallnacht Memorial Event
“Jewish and Other Refugees: Between the 1930s and the Present”
A panel discussion of the new book: Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945 by Marion Kaplan
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.