The Warsaw, Lodz and Vilna ghettos saw an extraordinary degree of cultural activity: reportage, poetry, theater, documentation and street songs. What was the impact of this cultural resistance? How should it be studied? This seminar will also consider the complex interplay of cultural and armed resistance in the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos.

Samuel Kassow (Trinity College)

About the Speaker: Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. From 2006 until the present he has been the lead historian for two of the galleries of the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Professor Kassow is the author of Students Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917 (University of California Press, 1989), The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry (YIVO, 2003) and Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana, 2007), a book which received the Orbis Prize and which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It has been translated into seven languages. He is also co-editor of Between Tsar and People (Princeton University Press, 1993) and edited In Those Nightmarish Days: the Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz (Yale University Press: 2015).

 

Moderator:

Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

Etta and Milton Leve Scholar-in-Residence Seminar

Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
Cosponsored by the
1939 Society
Samuel Goetz 1939 Society Chair in Holocaust Studies
UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies
UCLA Department of Germanic Languages
California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research
Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Seminar Reading Seminar Reading 2