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Event to be held at the Jena Center for 20th Century History, University of Jena, Germany

July 11-13, 2013

Conference

Ethnic Minorities and Holocaust Memory: A Global Perspective

Co-sponsored by the Jena Center for 20th Century History, the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, the Chair for Transatlantic Cultural History at the University of Augsburg, and the European Network for Contemporary History (EURHISTXX).

Organizers: Norbert Frei (Jena), Jacob Eder (Jena), Philipp Gassert (Augsburg), Alan E. Steinweis (Vermont).

Further details and a complete program will be posted at this space.

 

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Event to be held at the Center for Research in Contemporary History (ZZF), Potsdam, Germany

September 30 - October 2, 2013

Conference

German Society under National Socialism:
Viewpoints and Perspectives

(Die deutsche Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus.
Forschungspositionen und -perspektiven)

Co-sponsored by the Center for Research in Contemporary History (ZZF), Potsdam and the Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont.

Organizers: Winfried Süß (Potsdam), Rüdiger Hachtmann (Potsdam), Thomas Schaarschmidt (Potsdam), Alan E. Steinweis (Vermont).

Further details and a complete program will be posted at this space.

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Tuesday, October 8, 2013, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Lecture

Zionist Responses to Nazism
in the Jewish Community in Palestine

Mark Gelber, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel

This lecture will analyze the reactions to the rise of Nazism in Germany on the part of the Jewish-Zionist community living in Palestine. This community was comprised of politically and socially diverse factions, and by no means were the various responses uniform. The issue of possible discrepancies between the German Zionist organization and the Zionist leadership in Palestine is also raised in this context. By focusing on the issues of racialist theory and racism, völkisch ideology and community, and anti-Semitism, the lecture considers the complicated questions of "Zionist" compatibility and cooperation with Nazism, but also resistance to it, while demonstrating the range and diversity of Zionist attitudes overall in this context. As Nazi thinking and policy towards Jewry gradually changed in the years following the takeover and solidification of power, some Zionist reactions also exhibit certain signs of change which also require critical analysis.

Mark H. Gelber is an American-Israeli scholar of comparative literature and German-Jewish literature and culture. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University, having also studied as an undergraduate at the University of Bonn, the University of Grenoble, and Tel Aviv University. He received his M.A. and M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. In the same year he accepted an appointment as post-doctoral lecturer at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev, Beer Sheva, in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics. Except for guest professorships and periods of time spent as a research fellow abroad, he has been at BGU since that time. His research interests include: German-Jewish literature and culture, comparative literature, exile theory and the literature of exile, cultural Zionism, early Zionist literature and journalism, literary anti-Semitism, autobiography and biography, and the practice of literary reception. Since 2008 Gelber has directed the Research Center for Austrian and German Studies at Ben-Gurion University. He has been a member of the executive board of the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies since its founding at BGU. Gelber has published scholarly essays about the following: Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Elias Canetti, Martin Buber, Theodor Herzl, Nathan Birnbaum, Else Lasker-Schüler, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Max Nordau, E.M. Lilien, Thomas Mann, Gustav Freytag, Georg Hermann, Manfred Sturmann, Julius Bab, Nelly Sachs, Glückel von Hameln, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Emil Franzos, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Erica Jong, Elie Wiesel, Jakov Lind, and others.

 

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Monday, October 28, 2013, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

The Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First News of the Holocaust

Richard Breitman, American University

Why didn’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a brilliant speaker, denounce the Holocaust when he first learned about it?  This question implies a harsh answer—FDR didn’t care, and some have claimed it was because he was an anti-Semite.  Apart from its bias, the question is technically impossible to answer since one can never establish completely why someone didn’t do something.

But we can address a more neutral formulation: how did FDR react to early news about what we call Holocaust, a term that was not in common use in his day.  To do that we need to put relevant events in chronological order in order to see things as FDR experienced them.  We will get a better sense of connections and interactions.  In other words, we will understand Roosevelt better, even if we do not agree with his decisions.

Richard Breitman is the author or co-author of ten books and many articles in German history, U. S. history, and the Holocaust.   He is Distinguished Professor at American University and is also editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  Breitman’s book The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991) won the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History and was translated into five languages.  Another book Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), has also appeared in five foreign languages.  Breitman served as lead editor of the first two volumes of the diaries and papers of James G. McDonald (League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1933-35, and chairman of President Roosevelt’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, 1938-1945), part of a four-volume series published by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Breitman’s 2011 book Hitler’s Shadow, co-authored with Norman J. W. Goda, dealt with the fate of Nazi war criminals and collaborators in the postwar period.  It was based largely on newly declassified documents from the United States National Archives. Breitman served as director of historical research for the Nazi War Criminal Records and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency Working Group, which helped to bring about declassification of more than eight million pages of U.S. government records under a 1998 law.  FDR and the Jews (March 2013), co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, is the product of more than twenty-five years of research and thinking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture is made possible through a generous gift from Jerold D. Jacobson, Esquire, of New York City, UVM Class of 1962

 

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Tuesday, November 5, 2013, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Lecture

Richard Wagner in the Third Reich

Pamela Potter, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Looking first at Richard Wagner's own complex relationship toward Jews, Judaism, and race during his lifetime, this lecture will then examine how Wagner took on a largely symbolic meaning in Nazi Germany, even when performances of his works may have actually declined. It will then show how various theories about Wagner's racism and antisemitism proliferated after World War II, overstating the importance of his works in Hitler's Germany, and raising new ethical questions about their performance today.  

Pamela M. Potter is Professor of German and Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests have concentrated on relating music, the arts, and the writing of cultural history to ideological, political, social, and economic conditions, focusing on twentieth-century Germany, Jewish music, and the impact of German emigration on American musical life. She is the author of Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (Yale University Press, 1998), translated into German in 2000 and forthcoming in Portuguese, and co-editor with Celia Applegate of Music and German National Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Her newest book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press, forthcoming), raises questions about the uniqueness of Nazi culture and aesthetics and traces the roots of these ideas in Anglophone cultural histories.

 

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Thursday, March 13, 2014, 4:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Seminar

The German Resistance to Hitler
and the Persecution of the Jews

Peter Hoffmann, McGill Univeristy

 

Further details will be posted at this space.

 

 

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Monday, March 31, 2014, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Lecture

Recent Trends in Holocaust Research in Italy

Franklin H. Adler, Macalester College

What had happened to Italian Jews during the final phase of Fascism and during the German occupation of Northern Italy was not a subject faced by Italians once the Second World War ended and a new republic established by a coalition of parties that had participated in the anti-fascist resistance. Jews were melded into a larger group of “victims of fascism,” as if they had been targeted for discrimination and persecution primarily because they were “anti-fascists” rather than “Jews.” So far as the Shoah was concerned, an auto-exculpatory myth of the “good Italian” was created, counterposed to the pervasive image of the “bad German,” Italians, that is, who did whatever they could to protect and save their Jewish compatriots from roundups and deportation by the Germans to Auschwitz and other camps. The anti-Semitic policies of the Fascist regime, from 1938 to 1943, and later collaboration with the German occupying authorities, were rarely treated, even during the 1970s when a new, critical literature on Fascism emerged. It was only during the late 1980s, in the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1938 racial laws, that a new wave of research began to focus seriously on the racial policy of the Fascist regime (its origins, the role of intellectuals, the public response) and on the active collaboration of Italians in the arrest of Jews, the appropriation of their property, and their deportation to death camps.

Franklin H. Adler is the G. Theodore Mitau Professor of Political Science at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in Political Theory and Comparative Politics. He has published extensively on Western Marxism, Critical Theory and Hermeneutics, European movements of the extreme right, especially Italian Fascism and the contemporary far right in France. His first book on Italian Fascism focused on the complex relationship between industrialists and the regime (Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism, Cambridge University Press). He is currently writing a book on Italian Jews and Fascism, a topic on which he has published a number of critical essays that have appeared in the United States, Great Britain, Italy and France. A long-term editor of the journal Telos, his work has appeared in such other journals as Les temps modernes, Raisons Politiques, Il Ponte, Patterns of Prejudice, Modern Judaism, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Comparative Political Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. He also contributed to the four-volume Routledge anthology Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments, and to the two-volume Einaudi anthology Il Fascismo: Un dizionario Critico.

 

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April 8, 2014, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Lecture

On the Peripheries of the Holocaust:
Killings and Pillage of Jews by their Neighbors
in Occupied Poland

Jan T. Gross, Princeton University

 

Further details will be posted at this space.

Underwritten by the Ader/Konigsberg Endowment for Holocaust Studies at UVM

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April 28, 2014, 7:00 PM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

Yom Hashoah Lecture

Religion, Race and Emotion:
The Aryan Jesus in Nazi Germany

Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

For those Christians who embraced National Socialism, the figure of Jesus posed a particularly difficult problem: How could a Nazi worship a Jewish god? For some, the conflict led to a rejection of Christianity and a revival of medieval Teutonic myths and symbols. For others, the answer lay in a redefinition of Jesus as an Aryan whose goal was the destruction of Judaism. During the Third Reich, a group of German Protestant theologians, motivated by racism and tapping into traditional Christian anti-Semitism, redefined Jesus as an Aryan whose goal was the destruction of Judaism, and Nazism as fulfilling his mission. In 1939, these theologians established the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life,” financed by the Protestant church, that produced a dejudaized, nazified Christian Bible, hymnal, and theology. A center of passionate, pseudo-scholarship in the field of theology, this Institute was a powerhouse of antisemitic propaganda during World War II, and its members continued to hold flourishing careers in East and West Germany after the war.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of biblical scholarship, and the history of anti-Semitism. Her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award and Germany's Geiger Prize, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press). She is the author of over seventy articles and has edited several books, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays of Abraham Joshua Heschel; Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (with Robert P. Ericksen); Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (with David Biale and Michael Galchinsky). The recipient of many grants and awards, she has been a Rockefeller fellow at the National Humanities Center, and two years ago received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Colorado College; in 2008 she received an honorary doctorate from the Augustana Theologische Hochschule, a Protestant seminary in Bavaria, Germany. In November 2009, she received an honorary doctorate of sacred letters from the University of St. Michael's College, the graduate faculty in Catholic theology of the University of Toronto, and in May 2010 she received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, where she also delivered the Baccalaureate address. Between 1999 and 2008 she served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Research Center of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and on its subcommittee on archival materials and publications.

Underwritten by the Henry and Lili Altschuler Endowment

 

 

 

 

Last modified May 14 2013 09:49 AM