Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)

This is a live, online seminar held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.

Instructor: Emily Roche

Course Description:
The Holocaust, or the Shoah, was the deadliest and most well-documented genocide in modern history. In spite of the extreme conditions of war and genocide, European Jews found countless ways to resist, oppose, or sabotage the brutal war efforts of Nazi Germany and its allies. Why did some people resist, but not others? How was resistance possible during the Holocaust? What were some of the different kinds of resistance that characterized opposition to Nazism during the Holocaust? Why did some non-Jews aid resistance efforts, while others collaborated with German perpetrators? This course presents a history of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, focusing not only on acts of confrontational or violent resistance, but also placing importance on acts of resistance intended to record a historical record, resist the destruction of Jewish culture, and preserve individual and collective dignity.

This course will provide a general history of the Nazi period and the Holocaust primarily through the perspective of people who sought to resist fascism. Participants in this course will engage with primary sources—including memoirs, testimonies, and works of literature and art—to understand acts of wartime resistance and their context. In order to weave narratives of resistance into the full history of the European theater of war, we will look at a diverse array of stories, from archivists and architects in Warsaw to poets in Vilna and volunteer soldiers in Yugoslavia and Italy. We will discuss postwar plans of revenge, interrogating what role these complicated histories might play in the broader story of Holocaust resistance. Our course will conclude with discussions of the multivalent politics of memory surrounding wartime resistance narratives, and we will consider what role these histories play in contemporary political debates and conversations on genocide.

Who should take this course?
This class is open to anyone interested in the topic as outlined in the course description. The class discussion will be conducted in English, and all course materials will be read in English or in English translation. No previous background knowledge or specific education level is required.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Emily Julia Roche is currently a PhD Candidate in History at Brown University. Her dissertation explores the history of twentieth-century modern architecture in Poland through the optic of architectural networks and societies, focusing on the impact of antisemitism and the Holocaust on the architectural profession.

Emily’s work has been funded by several awards, including a Dissertation Research Grant from the Association of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (2020), a Graduate Student Research Grant from the Polish Studies Association (2020), and a Fulbright Study-Research Fellowship in Warsaw, Poland (2016-7). Her publications include an original translation of Władysław Szlengel’s “What I Read to the Dead” in Jewish Currents. Aside from her dissertation, she has worked on research projects concerning comparative memorial culture in Berlin and Warsaw, suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the relationship between nationalism and internationalism in interwar modernist architecture.

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