About

History of the Institute

The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst opened in March 2011. The Institute was co-founded by James E. Young and Lara R. Curtis and was established initially to house the generous gift of a permanent teaching exhibition on the Holocaust, "A Reason to Remember: Roth, Germany 1933-42," donated to the University by the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, formerly installed at Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield. The exhibition is open to university students and the general public, as well as to visiting middle and high school student groups by appointment. A travelling version of this exhibition is available to other borrowing institutions upon request. Since its opening, the Institute and its teaching exhibition have been visited by thousands of middle school, high school, and university students, who have toured the exhibition in the company of survivors and docents. 

With generous founding gifts from Pamela and Robert Jacobs of Washington, D.C., Brenda and Al Curtis of Springfield, and an anonymous local donor, the Institute continues to host monthly public lectures, conferences, screenings, university classes, and other visiting school groups. 

The Institute houses a 5,000 volume library on Holocaust, genocide, Jewish history, and memory. This library has been established with generous founding gifts from Schoen Booksellers, Estate of Gaston Schmir, Herbert and Elsa Roth, James Young, and Alon Confino. 

James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic Studies, joined UMass in 1988. An expert on Holocaust memory and the author of numerous books, Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany's national "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," which selected Peter Eisenman’s design, dedicated in May 2005. He has also consulted with Argentina’s government on its memorial to the desaparacidos. In 2003, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, won by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, dedicated on September 11, 2011. Among his books are Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, The Texture of Memory , which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, and NEH. 

Lara R. Curtis was the Institute’s first administrative director and held this position from its inception until 2017. Prior to joining the Institute, Curtis oversaw a curriculum project on Holocaust education for university and high school students throughout the Pioneer Valley and southern New England. Her work on this project led to a joint partnership between the UMass College of Education and the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, which was one of the main incentives for the establishment of the Institute. Dr. Curtis was an officer of the Foundation for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, which was a private organization created for the purpose of establishing the Institute during the first years of its existence. Over the years she cultivated many relationships with scholars, friends, and donors of the Institute both locally and worldwide, to ensure that it would serve as a venue for scholars and students today and in the future. Dr. Curtis is the author of Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion.  

As the inaugural Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Alon Confino became the second director of the IHGMS in 2017 and served until his passing in 2024. He was an eminent historian of Germany, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine, and a visionary director of the institute.

 

He was born in Jerusalem in 1959 in a country where memory, mythology, and hope were foundational, and if his country imprinted anything on him as an historian it may have been the ambiguities and complexities embedded in all three of these phenomena. After his undergraduate study at Tel Aviv University, he undertook his graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he emerged with his first book, The Nation as Local Metaphor (1997), an exploration of how the German Heimat was fashioned through an iconography of local identification.

 

His following books showed a rapidly expanding idiom and breadth of focus. These included Germany as a Culture of Remembrance (2006) and Foundational Pasts (2012), which elaborated the idea of the Holocaust as a ‘foundational past’ for the twentieth century, much as the French Revolution was for modern European history. In his most acclaimed work, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014), Confino harnessed memory studies in a groundbreaking understanding of the Holocaust as an historical event. In the book, Confino argued that the Nazis’ revolutionary tactic was to retell the history of Western civilization in order to establish the political imagination of a ‘world without Jews’ that preceded and enabled the extermination itself. In Confino’s later work he turned to the history of Israel-Palestine.

 

His last book, The Coast of Tantura: The Destruction of a Palestinian Village, 1948 (2023), which came out in Hebrew a few months before his death, tells the story of one Palestinian village in the context of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. The book intertwines history, memory and historiography in a multifaceted and virtuoso narrative of this crucial year in the history of Israel-Palestine.  In a powerful essay on the relationship between the Holocaust and the Nakba, Confino wrote, ‘Laws of physics propose that two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But memories are different. They can and do coexist, always.’ Recognizing such realities, he wrote, ‘makes us more and not less human: fallible and vulnerable as we all are.’

 

Words such as these suggest some of the incisive qualities of Alon Confino’s work—not only his originality but also his imaginative and human capacities. These qualities characterized other activities, including his leading role in fashioning the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism as counter to the IHRA definition. As director of the IHGMS, he took the full title of the institute as his brief, focusing not only on the Holocaust but also on genocide, mass violence, racial discrimination, and other topics related to the Holocaust, such as Zionism and the Nakba. He expanded the activities of the institute to include faculty seminars on a range of topics, and during the Covid pandemic turned the IHGMS into an international focal point for the discussion of new books, new topics, new forms of understanding. The Institute hosted dozens of seminars, book talks, lectures and webinars, creating a global community of scholars. Confino was insistent on making the IHGMS into a home for debate and open discussion on the UMass campus and beyond. He was, in short, a visionary and expansive director of the IHGMS, building on the strengths of the past and helping to put it on a meaningful trajectory for the future. His passing was a great loss for us all.