As part of the
CEU Summer University Holocaust Testimonies and Their Afterlives Public Lecture Series (July 10 –17, 2023 2023)
Laura Jockusch (Brandeis University)
Collect and Record! Postwar Historical Commissions
July 12, 6 pm Quantum Room (N15/101)
Prof. Jockusch’s research and teaching focus on the social, political, cultural, and legal histories of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust and engage in comparative, transnational, and cross-disciplinary perspectives.
Her first book studied the beginnings of Holocaust research by Jews and from a Jewish perspective immediately after the liberation from Nazi rule. Based on unpublished archival records in various languages, it is the first comparative history of a number of documentation centers and historical commissions that pioneered Holocaust research in the wake of the Second World War. Comparing the cases of France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, it retrieved from oblivion these first endeavors by Jews across Europe to write the history of the Holocaust and reappraised the earliest attempts to raise research questions and methodological problems that still have relevance for Holocaust and genocide studies today.
Abstract
This talk will analyze the role of the Central Jewish Historical Commissions work in the immediate postwar effort to document the personal experiences of survivors of the Holocaust.