Returning Home: Repatriation of Jewish Books Confiscated During WWII

In 2021, the Library of the Jewish Museum in Prague contacted Washington University Libraries to learn more about books in the Brisman Collection of Jewish Studies bearing the book stamp of the Library of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague. Both institutions worked together to prove that the books had been confiscated by the Nazis during World War II and to repatriate these stolen items to their rightful home.

From 4-5:30 pm, Hillel Kieval, Anika Walke, and Cassie Brand will give short presentations discussing Jewish books in the context of World War II and the process of repatriation, followed by a conversation moderated by Erin McGlothlin. A reception will follow the discussion.

Proposal-Writing Information Session & Workshop 2023

Information Session (registration open)

Thursday, August 24, 11 am–12:30 pm
Danforth University Center, Room 276

Roundtable discussion featuring:

• Bill Courtney, Research Development and Administration, Arts & Sciences 
• Nicole Moore, Office of Research Development 
• Nora Kelleher, Office of Foundation Relations
• Peter Kastor, the Samuel K. Eddy Professor in the Department of History and Associate Vice Dean of Research in Humanities, Humanistic Social Sciences, and Creative Practice in Arts & Sciences
• Tili Boon Cuillé, Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Proposal Workshop (registration closed)

Small-workshop group members have been sent an email with their meeting times and locations. Please contact cenhum@wustl.edu if you have not yet received this communication.

Friday, August 18, 12 pm CDT: Proposal submission due date

August 24 or 25: First Review 
Final date and time to be determined by the individual groups

Week of August 28: Revisions
Final date and time to be determined by the individual groups

Follow link below for details and registration. 

Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust

ANNUAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL LECTURE

From concentration camps to the murder sites of mobile shooting squads, Jews and Roma experienced Nazi persecution in close proximity to each other. Yet, after the war, the world recognized the injustices both groups faced differently. While Jewish persecution histories became memorialized in museums, monuments, and college courses, the international community largely ignored the Roma genocide. How should we tell the story of the Holocaust in light of this unequal treatment? How have relations between Jews and Roma—from the 1930s to the present—influenced the way we think about Nazi racial persecution?

Tracing the stories of many Romani and Jewish victims, survivors, historians, and activists, Ari Joskowicz vividly describes the experiences of Hitler’s forgotten victims and charts the evolving postwar relationship between Roma and Jews over the course of nearly a century. During the Nazi era, Jews and Roma shared little in common besides their simultaneous persecution. Yet the decades of entwined struggles for recognition have deepened Romani-Jewish relations. They now center not only on commemorations of past genocides or compensation practices but also on contemporary debates about antiracism and the future of democracy.

About the speaker

Ari Joskowicz is chair of Jewish Studies, associate professor of Jewish studies and European studies, and associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. As a historian of modern Jewish and European history, he is especially interested in the interplay between Jewish history and transnational minority politics since the Enlightenment. 

His new book, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2023), traces the unlikely entanglement of the histories of Jews and Romanies throughout the 20th century, focusing on Western and Central Europe as well as the United States and Israel. Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators and politicians, while the genocide of Europe’s Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.

Follow this link for more information on the Holocaust Memorial Lecture.