Legitimizing Genocide: Science, Scholarship and the Complicity of the Academy
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Winter Program Keynote Lecture
Admission: Free |
Antisemitic discourse operated in Nazi Germany as a way to legitimize antisemitic policy in German society. This discourse existed on multiple tiers, one of which was antisemitic “Jewish Research” which is the main subject of Alan Steinweis's book, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 2006). Join Steinweis and YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent for a discussion of how understanding this history can be used to understand antisemitism in other historical contexts, including the contemporary United States.
About the Speakers
Alan E. Steinweis is Professor of History and Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont, where he has taught since 2009. In addition to numerous articles and nine coedited volumes, he is the author of four books on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, including the soon-to-be-published The People’s Dictatorship: A History of Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is presently conducting research for a new book focusing on the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in November 1939 by the German cabinetmaker Georg Elser. Steinweis has held fellowships at the Free University of Berlin and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has been a guest professor at the Universities of Beersheba, Hannover, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Munich, and Augsburg.
Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.