Monday, April 3, 4 pm
Location: Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011 and on Zoom
Alexandra Kramen, Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Research Fellow
Atina Grossmann, Professor of History at the Cooper Union
This paper considers the theme of justice after the Holocaust. It examines the Yiddish periodical Bamidbar produced in Foehrenwald, the Displaced Persons Camp in Bavaria. It first assesses press coverage of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, highlighting the specific defects DP intellectual elites pinpointed in expressing their disappointment with the trials. It then explores other themes of Holocaust justice which emerged in these survivor-journalists' contributions, illuminating how the journalists defined and pursued justice through the press and transformed the periodical into an instrument of justice.
About the Speakers:
Alexandra Kramen is a Dr. Sophie Bookhalter Graduate Research Fellow at the Center and a PhD candidate in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where she holds a Claims Conference Fellowship and the Marlene and David Persky Research Award. Her dissertation, Justice Pursued: Jewish Survivors’ Struggle for Holocaust Justice in Displaced Persons Camp Föhrenwald, 1945-1957, will explore how survivors living in the longest-running Jewish displaced persons (DP) camp in postwar Germany conceived of and acted upon justice for the Holocaust. Her doctoral research has received additional support from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Leo Baeck Institute-New York, the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History, the JDC Archives, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Center for Jewish History. Kramen received her B.A. in History and Political Science with special interest certification in Holocaust Studies from Albright College. She subsequently earned a J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law, and an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her broader research interests include Jewish responses to the Holocaust in the wartime and postwar periods, Jewish life in modern Europe, and modern Jewish displacement and diaspora.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Relevant publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007, Wallstein 2012) and with Tamar Lewinsky the section “1945-1949” in A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945, ed. Michael Brenner (2018); and co-editor, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (with A.Patt, L.Levi, M. Mandel, 2019), and Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020). Her current research focuses on “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in the “Orient” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship. During the 2022-23 academic year she is the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
To register to attend and receive a pre-circulated paper please email miriam@cjh.org. Please specify whether you are attending in person or on Zoom and please read the paper in advance of the webinar.
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