Holocaust Archives - Public Seminar

History

Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

September 1, 2025 • by Alex Rossen and Karen Underhill

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...

Europe & Central Asia

Germany, Genocide, and Gaza

Why, critics ask, aren’t Germans forcefully condemning Israeli action in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide?

March 6, 2024 • by Andrew I. Port

What about German responses to the claim that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians constitute genocide? Many Germans are understandably wary to use that charged term when it comes to the Middle East because of their own history—the same reason why German officials have kept a tight rein on pro-Palestinian demonstrations ...

Europe & Central Asia

“The Symbolic Equivalent of a Pogrom” in Poland

The attack on historian Jan Grabowski broke the psychological barrier limiting public anti-Semitic actions

June 13, 2023 • by Irena Grudzińska-Gross

Since there are no longer any groupings of recognizable Jews in Poland, the assault on Jan Grabowski is the symbolic equivalent of a pogrom. The otherwise inexplicable destruction of property forms part of the pogrom repertoire. ...

“The Symbolic Equivalent of a Pogrom” in Poland

Genocide

Asia’s Auschwitz

An excerpt from Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust

May 22, 2023 • by Andrew I. Port

In an excerpt from Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, Andrew I. Port examines German responses to genocide in Cambodia....

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

A conversation between Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Dwayne Betts

April 22, 2021 • by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Marci Shore

Marci: As you know, the original impetus for this forum was horror of the children being taken away from their parents at the American border, and my saying to Stephen Naron that we should use material from the Fortunoff archive to prepare a film about parent-child separation during the Holocaust. ...

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

Migration

Trumpism and the Banality of Evil

More reflections on challenges of historical comparisons

December 4, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am astonished that it has come to this. I have long understood that the American political system is flawed. White supremacy is knitted into its fabric. The electoral college is a monster that has undermined majority rule and is now being used by Trump and his supporters in their quest ...

Migration

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

November 2, 2020 • by Daniella Doron

The history of Jewish familial separation is not only a story of Nazi occupied Europe, but also one of the United States. American efforts to facilitate the exit of Jewish children out of Nazi Germany were set in motion soon after the Nazi’s ascension to power in April 1933 and ...

Historical Analogies and Separated Families

North America

After Trump

Towards democracy and social justice

October 23, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

That, of course, is the problem. And the problem is grave. In 2016, we were worried about what Trump’s victory might mean. Now we know that things have become much worse than most of us ever imagined, and not only for us in the United States. Trump has been a revolutionary—he ...

Migration

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

October 23, 2020 • by A middle school teacher in Baltimore

I wonder if the fact that we are completely virtual (at least for now) helps students to listen to each other respectfully and to open to each other as they broadcast into the classroom from a familiar, private space. Of course, e-learning is not the same as in-person learning and has enormous ...

Universalizing Racism in Public Schools in 2020

Migration

Empathy

The only avenue in which humans can understand tragedy

October 21, 2020 • by Sebastian Ward

No human can have the exact same experience as another, but we can experience similar emotions. It is through emotions that we are able to display empathy; an understanding of feeling. Of course, I have always been able to feel empathy for people in Nazi concentration camps, but one particular ...

Migration

The Last Time I Saw Them- New Democracy Seminar Forum

On the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life

October 19, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Marci Shore and Stephen Naron

Can understanding distant parts of the world inspire deeper ways of thinking about our own? Can understanding moments in the past help us to think more creatively about the present? The Nietzschean “on the uses and disadvantages” is intended to suggest that thinking across time and space is not a ...

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore

In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...