Ari Joskowicz (Vanderbilt University) is author of “Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust,” a major new history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice - Annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture
Umrath Lounge
Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust
Ari Joskowicz (Vanderbilt University) is author of “Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust,” a major new history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice - Annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture
Umrath Lounge |
Ari Joskowicz
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.
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