THIS IS A PAST EVENT.
Please join us for a lecture to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Our speaker will be Professor Natalia Aleksiun, Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida.
In this talk, Prof. Aleksiun will explore a cohort of university-educated Polish Jewish historians active before the Holocaust: their lives and their self-conscious deployment of historical writing. Were they successful in carrying out their mission? As a collective biography, her talk situates the academic and popular work of these historians in the context of the time in which they lived, while resisting the impulse to understand and explain their experiences in the light of the tragic fate that befell many of them and their communities.
In the eyes of Polish Jewish historians – history offered hope for a better future, they saw history as a political tool. In researching Polish Jewish past, these men and women searched for a “usable past,” deeply embedded in communal life and animated by broader positive vision of Polish Jews’ rights and place in Poland. They undertook a complex project of building a conscious Jewish community, encompassing both a strong sense of Jewish identity and a close affinity with the Polish past.
Thursday, January 27, 2022 at 4:00pm to 5:15pm
Virtual EventFree and Open to the Public
Barry Trachtenberg
336-758-2512
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