Educating about genocide and mass atrocities
The history of genocide, mass atrocities, crimes against humanity and their continuing consequences stand at the core of the Strassler Center at Clark University. Home to a uniquely rich undergraduate program and a landmark doctoral program, the Strassler Center is the first and only institute of its kind.
Since 1998, it has gained international standing as the foremost PhD program training students in Holocaust History, the Armenian Genocide, and other genocides perpetrated around the globe.
Center faculty and students foster important scholarship and germinate significant ideas as conveners of a robust series of international symposia, workshops, and conferences that broaden the boundaries of genocide studies by introducing less known cases and novel approaches. The causes, conduct, and consequences of genocide are complex and require multifaceted approaches. The Strassler Center is committed to pushing boundaries in order to foster greater knowledge as well as to train professionals who hope to find solutions, offer healing and aid, education, and opportunities for memorialization.
Our faculty and expertise
“When you start to focus on their lives, then you can start to understand the way that these cycles of violence impact their possibilities for the future, their children’s possibilities and their sense of their own experiences .”
—Frances Tanzer, Ph.D.
Land acknowledgement
We acknowledge the long history of Nipmuc peoples and their bonds of kinship on the land where the Strassler Center community teaches, learns, and researches about genocide and mass violence.
Strassler Center in focus
News
Featured event
All Men Are Brothers: Bundist Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland
28 April 2026 |4:00pm |Higgins Lounge
Dana Commons
Speaker: Molly Crabapple (Artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun (with Marwan Hisham), which was longlisted for a National Book Award. Her reportage is the winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, and has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.).
More about this event
In the summer of 1939, The Jewish Labor Bund swept Polish municipal elections, cementing their status as the country’s most popular Jewish political party. The Nazis invaded that September. In the charnel house of occupied Poland, the Bund turned its party into an underground network of survival, and defiance. At the same time, they held fast to their ethos of universalist solidarity. As the cover of their illicit newspaper, Voice of Youth, stated, “All men are brothers, whether yellow, black, brown, or white. Talk of peoples, colors, and races is a bunch of nonsense.” Nothing exemplified this belief more than their collaboration with the Polish Socialist Party. But when the Nazis launched their campaign of extermination, these bonds would be put to the ultimate test.
Reception and book signing will follow lecture.
Sponsored by the Strassler Center at Clark University (Asher Lecture Series) and the Berman Center at Lehigh University
Co-sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, and the Department of History
