Speakers: Ousmane Power-Greene (Clark University), Carl Suddler (Emory University), and Anne Gray Fischer (University of Texas-Dallas) A tidal wave of social and political unrest during 2020 culminated in widespread demands for change. Protests in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor inspired debates and movements that drew attention to the long struggle […]
Speaker: Adama Dieng (Special Adviser, Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide (OSASPG)) The Genocide Against the Tutsi took place in 1994, when nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in just 100 days in the small, land-locked country of Rwanda. What lessons can we learn about UN intervention, genocide […]
Speakers: Christian Parenti (author, journalist and Associate Professor of Economics, John Jay College) and Roy Scranton (author and Assistant Professor of English, University of Notre Dame) A powerful shift in American collective awareness of the climate crisis has occurred thanks to scientific reports released in fall 2018, a new level of attention in the media, […]
Speakers: Radwan Ziadeh (Senior Fellow, United States Institute of Peace), Ora Szekely (Clark University), Noha Aboueldahab (Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program, Brookings Institution) The Syrian conflict has claimed the lives of a half-million people since 2011. Nearly five million more people have fled the country. The panelists will explain the key drivers of the […]
Speakers: Raffi Bedrosyan (civil engineer, concert pianist, and author of Trauma and Resilience: Armenians in Turkey – hidden, not hidden and no longer hidden (2018)) and George Aghjayan (Director of the Armenian Historical Archives and the chair of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) Central Committee of the Eastern United States ) The 1915 Genocide led […]
A symposium to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Strassler Center’s doctoral program and to celebrate the long-term leadership of founding Strassler Center Director and inaugural Rose Professor Debórah Dwork gathers graduates to respond to the theme of agency in the Holocaust and Genocide. Agency addresses the choices that individuals have, their decisions and actions, […]
Welcome President David Angel Introduction: Debórah Dwork and the Strassler Center Mary Jane Rein Executive Director Keynote Address: Americans in Dangerous Territory: Relief and Rescue Operations during the Nazi Years Debórah Dwork Inaugural Rose Professor and Strassler Center Founding Director A number of Americans — Quakers, Unitarians, secular people, Jews — traveled to points around […]
Comparative perspectives on memories of racism, slavery, and genocide in the United States and the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe will be the focus of E Pluribus Unum? Participants will inquire into the tension between memory conflicts and processes and problems of social cohesion, integration, and identity. Can the US learn […]
Speaker: Ian Buruma (Paul Williams Professor of Human Rights, Democracy, and Journalism, Bard College) Buruma will discuss how history affects contemporary politics, focusing on memories of World War II. Scholars have written extensively about the ways in which the Germans and Japanese have dealt with their darkest years. Less attention has been paid to how […]
Speaker: Frances Tanzer (Visiting Assistant Professor, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies) After 1945, Austrians deemed images of pre-Nazi Vienna essential for projects to re-imagine Viennese, Austrian, and European identities at home and abroad. Yet, the celebration of a world in which the Jewish minority had been central ensured that representations of Jewish absence […]
Speaker: Benjamin Korstvedt (Professor of Music, Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Clark University) During the 1930s, the legacy of the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) became an object of intense political and ideological attention as the Nazi movement sought, in effect, to annex his music. This talk will outline why and how this came […]
Speaker: Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay (Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature; Advisor, Yiddish MA Program, Tel Aviv University) The specter of multilingualism has haunted the study of Holocaust testimony for decades. Several factors have stretched the linguistic spread of Holocaust witnessing: the fall of the Soviet Union rendered archives in lesser known languages more accessible; organizations like […]
