What does it take to survive persecution and exile? The story of Greta Taussig and Rudy Gans offers answers to this tantalizing question. Born in Linz, Austria, Greta emigrated to London after the country’s incorporation into the Third Reich, eventually enduring the horrors of the Blitz. Rudy was able to make his way to Shanghai after imprisonment in the notorious Dachau concentration camp. Along their arduous journey, each experienced the life-saving kindness of courageous strangers. As part of the UC San Diego Holocaust Living History Workshop, their son, Bob Gans, shares their thought-provoking story, supplemented by a display of artifacts and original documents. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39008]
On December 19, 1980, Shlomo Lewin, the former chairman of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, and his partner Frida Poeschke were shot dead in their house in Erlangen. Instead of pursuing the leads that led to the right-wing extremist group Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, investigators concentrated on Lewin’s social environment for a long time. As part of UC San Diego's Holocaust Living History Workshop, German historian Uffa Jensen reconstructs the crime and its motivations, in the process unearthing a history of violence, trivialisation and repression that continues to this day. Jensen is a historian of modern history and serves as the deputy director at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38976]
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. In 2020, the archives were finally opened. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents, Brown University Professor Emeritus David Kertzer’s book “The Pope at War” paints a dramatic portrait of what the Pope did and did not do as war enveloped Rome and the continent, and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Kertzer's earlier book, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe,” won the Pulitzer Prize. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38975]
Between 1918 and 1921, Ukrainian peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution murdered over a 100,000 Jews. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. In his new book “In the Midst of Civilized Europe,” acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of multiple prize-winning books, including “The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage” (2000), “Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire” (2009), and “In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine” (2013). Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 39078]
Among the most striking exhibits at the Auschwitz museum are undoubtedly the mountains of loot stolen from Jews murdered upon arrival. Shoes, suitcases, spectacles, and more fill entire rooms in the former barracks of the main camp. Surviving the Shoah when their owners did not, they constitute a potent proof of the Nazis’ abiding concern with material gain. In this talk, author and historian Peter Hayes traces the ways by which the German corporate world became deeply implicated in—and in many respects indispensable to—the Nazi regime’s persecution, exploitation, and murder of Europe’s Jews. He argues that these developments stemmed inexorably from decisions made and actions taken by the nation’s leading corporate executives in 1933, at the very outset of Nazi rule. Hayes is author or editor of 13 books, including the best-selling “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” and “Why? Explaining the Holocaust,” which has been translated into several foreign languages including German, Slovak, Spanish, and Chinese. He is currently completing (with Stephan Lindner of Munich) “Profits and Persecution: German Big Business, the Nazi Economy, and the Holocaust.” Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38423]
Twentieth-century fascism was a political ideology encompassing totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany’s case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Historians of the Holocaust tend to reject the notion of fascism as a causal explanation for its origins. Conversely, scholars of fascism present the Shoah as a particular event that is not central to fascist historiography. In this lecture Federico Finchelstein examines the challenge the Holocaust presents to the transnational history of ideology and politics. A leading contemporary authority on global fascism, Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at NSSR. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38422]
How does the concept of space enhance our understanding of the Holocaust? In this talk, British historian Tim Cole tells the story of the Shoah through an exploration of landscapes victims moved—and were moved—through across Europe. His exploration of the “Holocaust landscapes” shines a powerful light on the geographic dimensions of the Shoah. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37452]
Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. Renamed Israel by the Nazis, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. In exile, he fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus. Marc David Baer discusses his new book “German, Jew, Muslim, Gay” in which he tells the story of a highly unconventional man and reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37451]
When the Second World War came to an end, Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, lay in ruins. Few contemporaries, if any, could have anticipated that 70 years later, Berlin would boast large diaspora communities of Palestinians and Israelis who have made a home among Germans. In “The Moral Triangle,” Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and Germans in Berlin to explore the fraught relationship between the three groups in the context of official German policies, public discourse and the private sphere. Atshan is author of “Queer Palestine: Empire of Critique.” Galor, an art historian and archaeologist, is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer of Judaic Studies at Brown University. Her publications include ”The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans” (co-authored with Hanswulf Bloedhorn) and ”Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideology.” Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37751]
Helen Epstein, a prolific journalist and author, discusses her mother's memoir about her life in Nazi-occupied Europe. "Franci's War" starts in 1942 when 22-year-old Franci Rabinek began a three-year journey that would take her from Terezin, the Nazis’ “model ghetto,” to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, slave labor camps in Hamburg, and finally Bergen Belsen. Trained as a dress designer, Franci survived the war and would go on to establish a fashion salon in New York. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37412]
Who was Josef Mengele? After the end of the Holocaust, the German physician has been increasingly viewed as the personification of supreme evil both in the minds of survivors and the public at large. In this lecture based on his highly acclaimed book “Mengele,” David Marwell untangles history and myth surrounding the man known variously as the Angel of Death and the good uncle, suggesting that Mengele was not so much a uniquely monstrous perpetrator, but more a willing part of a monstrous machine of destruction. Marwell has had a distinguished career as chief of investigative research at the US Department of Justice, associate museum director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and director and CEO of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 36713]
What is everyday life, and how is it experienced under extreme stress? This is the broader question that animates the research of Anna Hájková, an associate professor of Modern Continental European History at the University of Warwick. In her talk, Hájková examines sex work, sexual violence, and coercion of Jewish women and men in concentration camps, ghettos, and in hiding. She is the author of many journal articles and books, including her current project, “Boundaries of the Narratable: Transgressive Sexuality and the Holocaust.” This pioneering study seeks to contribute to our understanding of gender and sexual violence during the Holocaust and explores the erasure of narratives of gays and lesbians who were deported as Jews and who subsequently vanished from the historical record. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 36710]
At the height of World War II, a team of Soviet scholars embarked on an ambitious goal to collect recently written songs dealing with the Holocaust. Lost until the early 1990's, these songs were rediscovered and recorded with an ensemble of recognized soloists. Thanks to the painstaking labor of Anna Shternshis and the talent of Psoy Korolenko, audiences worldwide can now enjoy and reflect upon this treasure trove of songs that offer a precious glimpse into an unfolding tragedy and the artistic reaction to it. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 36542]
As a child, Gabriella Karin was separated from her parents and placed in a Slovakian convent for three years. Although physically safe, she did not emerge unscathed. Suppressed memories of her past came flooding back once she began to fashion sculptures related to the Holocaust later in life. Her journey offers important insight into trauma and how creativity can be used as a tool to process memories of oppression, persecution, and loss. Karin is a docent at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and participates in the Righteous Conversations Project, which unites survivors and students through art. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 36071]
In his new book, Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Drawing on a number of case studies such as radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial, videotapes of Holocaust survivor testimonies, and the recent use of digital platforms for holographic witnessing, he demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds the traumatic condition itself. His insights have crucial implications for media studies and the digital humanities field as they provide new ways to understand the relationship between technology and human suffering. Pinchevski is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 35017]
Yale University professor and filmmaker Charles Musser explores the historical and contemporary perspectives of race relations in German and American cinema from the 1920s by examining The Ancient Law (1923) and The Jazz Singer (1927). He evaluates how each film addresses anti-Semitism as well as the burning question of the history of blackface as a theatrical convention. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 35016]
As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past. In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. She combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 35015]
Archivist Regina Longo (Brown University) joins UCSB’s Harold Marcuse (Department of History) for a discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s final film Shoah: Four Sisters (2018), a four-part miniseries that was screened over two days at the Pollock Theater. Longo’s work includes extensive restoration of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary footage of testimonials from the Holocaust, and in conversation with Marcuse she offers deeper insight into the history of the film and the women it concerns. Longo explains how Lanzmann’s Shoah was initially funded and produced, how hundreds of hours of footage is being carefully restored from original prints and made available online, and how Four Sisters both influences and is situated in a legacy of film, legal testimony, memoir, and other post-war efforts to represent the un-representable horror of the Shoah. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34842]
Despite the explosive growth of Holocaust studies, scholars of Nazi Germany and the Shoah long neglected gender as an analytical category. It wasn’t until 1984 when the essay collection When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany raised awareness of women’s experiences under fascism. It explored women’s double jeopardy as females and as Jews. In this lecture, Marion Kaplan, one of the editors the publication, takes the audience on a historical tour of her research, from the first workshops raising questions to the first publications providing answers. Since then, the gender perspective has provided significant insight into our understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany and during the Holocaust. Kaplan concludes her talk with a forward look at new areas of research that highlight women’s and gender studies. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34018]
The suite of international conventions and declarations about genocide, human rights, and refugees after the WWII is known as the “human rights revolution.” It is regarded as humanizing international affairs by implementing the lessons of the Holocaust. In this presentation, Dirk Moses, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, questions this rosy picture by investigating how persecuted peoples have invoked the Holocaust and made analogies with Jews to gain recognition as genocide victims. Such attempts rarely succeed and have been roundly condemned as cheapening the Holocaust memory, but how and why does genocide recognition require groups to draw such comparisons? Does the human rights revolution and image of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide humanize postwar international affairs as commonly supposed? Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34019]
Jody Capogreco
Thank you, The key to erasing hate of any kind is Education. I will never understand why people hate others because they are different.