The 2024 Malka and Eitan Evan Annual Yom Ha-Shoah Lecture

The event will take place on Monday, April 8, at 6:30 pm. in the Standish Room (Science Library, third floor), at the UAlbany Uptown Campus.

Dr. Atina Grossman, will present on “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe.”

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City. Among her numerous publications are Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany and Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and as co-editor, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union 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. Her most recent publication on the topic of “Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” is included in the volume Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt (Bloomsbury 2023). 

 
In her lecture, Dr. Grossman will examine the ambivalent, paradoxical, and diverse experiences, emotions, and memories of Jews who found refuge from National Socialism and the Holocaust in India and Iran after 1933.  Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, uprooted Jews were also precariously privileged as white Europeans, in non-western, colonial or semi-colonial societies. An extensive collection of family correspondence and memorabilia extending from wartime Nazi Berlin throughout the global diaspora of German Jewry as well as archival, literary, visual, and oral history sources illuminates refugees’ everyday lives, in the changing context of interwar fascination and contact with the “Orient,” global war against fascism, anti-colonial independence movements, and gradual revelations about the destruction of the European world they had escaped.
 
Refreshments will be served prior to the lecture beginning at 6:00pm.