Spring 2018 Speakers
On Thursday, April 19, eminent historian Prof. Konrad H. Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at UNC-Chapel Hill, will give an evening lecture entitled “Broken Lives: How Ordinary German Jews and Gentiles Experienced the Twentieth Century.” It will begin at 7:30 pm in Belk Library Room 114. His talk will also be part of the events co-organized by the Center to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. It is free of charge and no tickets are required. For more information, call 828.262.2311.
Former ASU Historian Dr. Jeremy Best (Iowa State) will give a public presentation on “White Lies: The Deceptions of White Nationalists on College Campuses” on Monday, April 16. The lecture will begin at 1:00 pm in the Plemmons Student Union's Rough Ridge, Room 415, fourth floor. He will also address the frequent inroads and recruitment attempts by White Nationalist and White Supremacists on the Appalachian State University's campus. The event is co-organized by ASU's History Department and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies.
The Center will open this year's Yom HaShoah commemorations with a talk by Eliot Nidam, the Head of the Academic Affairs Section of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Nidam's talk is entitled "Living with the Other: Religious Congregations in France and the Hiding of Jews During the Holocaust" and will take place on April 11, from 7:00 until 9:00 pm in 201 AB Blueridge Ballroom at Plemmons Student Union. The event is free of charge and no tickets are required. For more information, please call the Center at 828.262.2311 or email holocaust@appstate.edu. Organized with the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
This program is made possible by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, supported by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund.
On Thursday, April 12, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), the Center for Judaic Holocaust, and Peace Studies along with the Temple of the High Country and ASU’s Hillel chapter will organize a public reading of the names of European Jews murdered by the Germans and their allies during the Holocaust. Weather permitting, this reading will take place from 10:00 am until 6:00 pm in the outside square between ASU’s Belk Library and the University’s Bookstore in Plemmons Student Union (end of College Street). It is followed by an evening commemoration at the Temple of the High Country.
Organized by the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, renowned Holocaust educator Dr. Racelle Weiman will give a presentation entitled “A Dialogue on ‘Freedom’ in 1945: Black US Soldiers and Holocaust Survivors” on Tuesday, April 10, at Ann Belk Hall, Room 233, beginning at 11:00 am.
In the immediate aftermath of the Spring 1945 U.S.’s Army liberation of the satellite camp of Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945, Nisan 21, the last day of Passover--the Festival of Freedom--a segregated Black Quartermasters' unit “adopted” and hid two Polish Jewish boys illegally within their barracks. The extraordinary discoveries, the perspectives, the prejudices and misconceptions and ultimate philosophical, theological and existential understandings between them will be at the center of the talk.
Dr. Weiman has 30 years of professional expertise in Holocaust Studies and Interreligious/Interethnic Dialogue, with a focus on educational multi-media tools and skills, leadership development and community-building. She specializes in designing creative and transformative approaches to minority rights and prejudice reduction. Her groundbreaking work in the field of Holocaust and Genocide education, conflict resolution and interreligious dialogue includes the production of award winning films and curriculum, and the development and execution of exhibitions of all sizes and mediums, festivals and conferences, international tours and projects, workshops, academic courses and leadership training, and social entrepreneurship on a global level.
For more information, please call the Center at 828.262.2311 or email holocaust@appstate.edu.
Dr. Mark Bray (Dartmouth College) will give a lecture entitled “Antifa: The History and Theory of Antifascism” on Thursday, March 29 at Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114, beginning at 7:00pm. Bray is a historian of human rights, terrorism, and political radicalism in Modern Europe, who completed his PhD in Modern European and Women's and Gender History at Rutgers University in 2016. He is the author of The Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. The Center is pleased to partner with the ASU Humanities Council in organizing the visit.
In collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and The Center for Academic Excellence, Appalachian State University’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies will be offering a special workshop to provide the campus community with information on how to utilize the newly-acquired USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive to enhance teaching, learning, and research endeavors on the ASU campus. Facilitated by Professor Wolf Gruner (Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California and Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research), workshop participants will have full access to the Foundation’s Visual History Archive that contains over 54,000 video testimonies of survivors and other eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, the Rwandan, Armenian, Cambodian, and Guatemalan genocides, and the Nanjing Massacre in China. The Shoah Foundation Testimony in Classroom & Research workshop will take place on Tuesday, March 20, from 12:00pm-2:00pm in Room 421, of Belk Library and Information Commons. To register, go to https://workshops.appstate.edu/detail.aspx?key=1662. For more information, call 828.262.2311
The Center is pleased to invite the public to an evening lecture entitled "Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Individual Jewish Reactions to the Persecution in Nazi Germany" by the renowned Holocaust scholar Professor Wolf Gruner on Monday, March 19. It will take place from 7:00 until 9:00 pm in Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114. Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and is the Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He is the author of eight books on the Holocaust, among them his important study of “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims” (Cambridge University Press). As all Center events, it is free of charge and no tickets are required. For more information, call 828.262.2311.
The Center invites the ASU and broader High Country communities to a public lecture by Prof. Thomas Kühne on Monday, February 12. The lecture will focus on “‘The Murderers Are Among Us’: Images of and Inquiries into Holocaust Perpetrators since the Third Reich.” Prof. Kühne is the Strassler Chair in the Study of Holocaust History and the Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Massachusetts. The lecture will start at 7:00 pm in Belk Library and Information Commons, Room 114. It is free of charge and no tickets are required. The Center will also organize a research colloquium with Prof. Kühne. For more information, call 828.262.2311.