Welcome President David Angel Introduction: Debórah Dwork and the Strassler Center Mary Jane Rein 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 the globe […]
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 […]
Abdul Hamid II Era and Beyond Conference Program Opening Panel: From Abdul Hamid II to the Genocide: Continuity and Rupture Speakers: Ronald Suny (William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago) and Stephan Astourian (Professor of […]
Speaker: Mishy Lesser (Learning Director of the Upstander Project and Educational Fellow at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut) For decades, child welfare authorities have been removing Native American children from their homes to save them from being Indian. In Maine, the first official “truth and reconciliation commission” in the […]
Screening: Etched in Glass: The Legacy of Steve Ross Speakers: Michael Ross ’93 (Attorney, Prince, Lobel, Tye LLP and former Boston City Councilor) and Roger Lyons (Writer/Producer/Director) A survivor of 10 concentration camps, Steve Ross immigrated to Boston after the Holocaust. He became a civic leader and the driving force behind the creation of the Boston Holocaust […]
Speaker: Mneesha Gellman (Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, at Emerson College, Boston) Professor Gellman examines six case studies in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador to show how memory-based narratives serve as emotionally salient leverage for marginalized communities to facilitate state consideration of minority rights agendas. Shaming […]
Speakers: Tun Khin (President Burmese Rohingya Organization UK), John Knaus (Associate Director for Asia, National Endowment for Democracy), Debbie Stothard (Director of Altsean-Burma and Secretary General of International Federation for Human Rights) and Matt Wells (Amnesty International Senior Crisis Advisor) Who are the Rohingya? And why do so many people in Burma/Myanmar regard them as […]
Speaker: Stefan Ihrig (Professor Of History At The University Of Haifa). For Germany, the Armenian Genocide did not take place “far away in Turkey.” It was something very close to home. Relations between the German empire and the Ottoman Empire had been close since the 1890s. Since then Germany had become accustomed to excuse violence […]
