International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Art is always intertwined with the social and political worlds of its creation. In this program, Professor Willa M. Johnson will tell the stories of political dissidents and Jewish men, women, and children who were interned across Europe, including in the pre-war German city of Düsseldorf and in three war-period French camps, using the work of the German Communist artist Karl Schwesig and a chorus of archival data.

 

Willa M. Johnson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Through an Artist's Eyes: The Dehumanization and Racialization of Jews and Political Dissidents During the Third Reich (Routledge, 2021). Professor Johnson has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem’s Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, and was the 2012-13 Cummings Foundation Fellow at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

In his lecture, Professor Edward Westermann offered a comparison between the National Socialist conquest of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the process of U.S. westward expansion between 1850 and 1890. His talk offered important insights into the similarities and the differences between the two national projects of conquest and the acts of atrocity and mass killings that accompanied them.

 

Edward B. Westermann is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (University Press of Kansas, 2005) and Flak: German Anti-Aircraft Defenses, 1914-1945 (University Press of Kansas, 2001). Professor Westermann has published over forty articles and book chapters in the areas of Holocaust and military history. He is the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships: he has been a Fulbright Fellow, a three-time German Academic Exchange Service Fellow, a DeGolyer Library Research Fellow at Southern Methodist University, and most recently, a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC for the academic year 2018-2019. His current book project, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol, Masculinity and the Intoxication of Mass Murder in Nazi Germany is forthcoming with Cornell University Press and will be published in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Professor David E. Fishman discussed his new book, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis, which tells the story of ghetto inmates who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts – first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets – by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania."

 

David E. Fishman is a Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) where he is an authority on the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe. Fishman is also the director of Project Judaica, JTS’s academic program in Jewish Studies in the former Soviet Union, which allows students to pursue a major in Jewish history and culture at universities in Moscow and Kiev. Fishman is a native Yiddish-speaker and frequently travels to Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia to conduct research and lecture.

How should we think about the transmission of Holocaust memory more than seventy years after the defeat of Nazi Germany? What lessons do the events of the Shoah bear for a moment in which far-right political movements are once again on the rise? In order to address such questions, Professor Michael Rothberg considered immigrants’ engagement with the Holocaust in contemporary Germany. The works of art, literature, and performance that he discussed modeled alternative ways of remembering the Nazi genocide in the twenty-first century and suggested possibilities for an ethically and politically engaged memory work.

 

Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. His is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and special issues of the journals Criticism, Interventions, Occasion and Yale French Studies. He is currently completing The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators and Inheritance Trouble: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance (with Yasemin Yildiz.)

The voids and empty spaces in the Jewish Museum in Berlin evoke destruction and absence. In this public lecture, Professor Nils Roemer aims to explore these absences and voids as important aspects of remembrance, particularly in relation to public commemorations of the Holocaust in museums and on Holocaust remembrance days. He will develop these themes of absence and advance models of remembrance that view the Holocaust as an historical event of the past amid the enormous void of an annihilated future. Nils Roemer is the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies and the Director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2000. In addition to his numerous published articles, Professor Roemer is the author of Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005) and The Story of Worms: German Cities – Jewish Memories (2010). He is currently finishing a book-length study on Central European Jewish travel writing in the twentieth century. Professor Roemer serves as a board member for the Leo Baeck Institute in London and is an external reviewer for multiple scholarly journals. He has received numerous fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The question of collaboration remains one of the most sensitive and contested issues regarding the study and memory of the Holocaust in Greece today, especially in the major port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki). On the eve of the war, Salonica was home to the country’s largest Jewish population, numbering 56,000; in 1945, less than 2,000 remained. Another casualty of the occupation was the city’s vast Jewish burial ground, which covered more than eighty acres and was once the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. During the Nazi occupation, local authorities initiated the destruction of the cemetery and subsequently erected the city’s university campus on top of it. Marble tombstones were used for construction projects throughout the city.

This presentation will explore the rationale underpinning the demolition of the Jewish cemetery and how the processes at work during the Nazi’s occupation provided an opportunity to resolve an on-going conflict regarding the status of the Jewish burial ground and preexisting aspirations to expand the nearby university. During the pre-war period, local Jewish leaders argued that the tombstones “spoke,” that the inscriptions narrated the history of the city and ought to be preserved as monuments of national patrimony. The competing interests came to a head during the occupation. Even if the stones “spoke,” who was prepared to listen? Drawing on previously unstudied archives of the Jewish community, records from the local chamber of commerce, and newspapers in Judeo-Spanish, Greek, and French, this talk presented a window into the confrontation and negotiation between the Jewish community of Salonica and the Greek state over urban space and the national narrative in the context of the Nazi occupation. Controversy over the place of the Jewish dead ultimately served as a metaphor for the uncertain place of the living.

Devin E. Naar is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies, assistant professor of History, and chair of the new Sephardic Studies Program at the University of Washington. He completed his Ph.D. in history at Stanford University where his dissertation, “Jewish Salonica and the Making of the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans,’ 1890-1943,” received the department’s award for best dissertation. A former Fulbright scholar to Greece, Naar has served as a fellow in the Society of Scholars at the University of Washington Center for the Humanities, and also sits on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish History in New York.

The summer of 1944 saw Soviet forces lead a surprisingly quick advance West during Operation Bagration, a forward movement that led to the liberation of Majdanek, an almost intact extermination camp close to the Polish city of Lublin on July 23. The horrors found inside the ‘death factory’ were described in articles, captured in photos and filmed by Soviet and Polish camera crews. In this lecture, Dr. Drubek will examine how the incontrovertible evidence of Nazi atrocities was an unexpected blow to the Nazi leadership, which had worked hard to hide all the traces of the death camps and ghettos in the East. As a response, the German propaganda machine struck back by producing its own film showing ‘happy’ Jewish life in a ghetto guarded by the SS. In an unexpected and macabre twist, German film producers invited a Jewish comedian to take a leading role in the film.

 

Natascha Drubek is a Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She completed her MA and PhD in Slavic Studies & History of Eastern Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Drubek was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Film School FAMU in Prague with the project “Hypertextual Film Presentation” (hyperkino.net). She is also the co-editor of the series Osteuropa Medial with Boehlau Verlag, a Cologne based publishing house. Since 2003, Drubek has served as the editor of the Film & Screen Media section of artmargins.com. Her most recent book was published in 2012 under the title Russisches Licht. Von der Ikone zum frühen sowjetischen Kino (Russian Light: From the Icon to Early Soviet Cinema). Dr. Drubek is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Fifty years ago, Israel shocked the world when it announced that it had captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Final Solution. His trial in Jerusalem is considered to have caused a major change in the world’s knowledge of the Holocaust. How much of an impact did it really have? Did it really get survivors to speak about their experiences in a way that they had never spoken before? Does it have relevance for us today in terms of war crimes and the punishment of their perpetrators?

 

In addition to her vast scholarship, Lipstadt is known widely as the defendant in the David Irving vs. Penguin Books/Deborah Lipstadt case. Following the publication of her critically acclaimed 1993 book, “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” the first full-length study of those who attempt to deny the Holocaust, Lipstadt and her British publisher were sued by author David Irving for identifying him as a Holocaust denier. The judge found David Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist and anti-Semite. According to The New York Times, the trial “put an end to the pretense that Mr. Irving is anything but a self-promoting apologist for Hitler.” Her 2006 book, “History on Trial: My Day in Court with A Holocaust Denier,” is the story of that trial. The book won the 2006 National Jewish Book Award and was first runner up for the Koret Award.

 

Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the Department of Religion. Lipstadt's book, The Eichmann Trial, published by Schocken/Nextbook Series in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Eichmann trial, was called by Publisher’s Weekly, “a penetrating and authoritative dissection of a landmark case and its after effects.” The Kennedy School’s David Gergen described it as “a powerfully written testimony to our ongoing fascination with the proceedings, the resonance of survivor tales, and how both changed our understanding of justice after atrocity.” At Emory she created the Institute for Jewish Studies and was its first director from 1998-2008. She directs the website known as HDOT [Holocaust Denial on Trial/ www.hdot.org ] which, in addition to cataloging legal and evidentiary materials from David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, contains answers to frequent claims made by deniers. This section, Myths and Facts, received a grant from the Conference for Material Claims against Germany for the translation of the site into Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish. The site is frequently accessed in cities throughout Iran. Its seventh most visited country is Saudi Arabia.

 

Lipstadt was an historical consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and helped design the section of the Museum dedicated to the American Response to the Holocaust. She was appointed by President Clinton to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council on which she served two terms. She was a member of its Executive Committee of the Council and chaired the Educational Committee and Academic Committee of the Holocaust Museum. Dr. Lipstadt has been called upon by members of the United States Congress to consult on political responses to Holocaust denial. From 1996 through 1999 she served as a member of the United States State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. In this capacity she, together with a small group of leaders and scholars, advised Secretary of State Madeline Albright on matters of religious persecution abroad. In 2005 she was asked by President George W. Bush to be part of a small delegation which represented the White House at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.