Jewish Studies
Jewish Studies WEek Fall 2024
Friday, November 8th
Central European Cafe
Special Guest: Marsha Lederman
Author and Global & Mail columnist, Marsha Lederman will speak to both her experience as a second generation Holocaust survivor as well as her experience as a journalist and writer. Her book Kiss the Red Stairs was an instant national bestseller and won the Cindy Roadburg Memorial Prize for Memoir/Biography at the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards in 2023.
2:00 p.m. MST
Senate Chamber, Arts & Convocation Hall
Photo credit: Ben Nelms
November 20th
Stars without a Heaven: Children in the Holocaust
Telus Centre Atrium
A free public exhibition dedicated to the unique stories of children during the Holocaust. Despite their appalling situations and living conditions, children still engaged in imaginative play, sketching and writing, expressing their hopes, dreams and fears. The exhibition opens a moving and exhilarating glimpse into the lives of Jewish children during the Holocaust, through the selection of drawings, poems, letters and toys presented.
Wednesday, November 20th
5:30 p.m. MST
Telus Centre Auditorium (150)
2024 Annual Toby & Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture
The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe
Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey, Special Chair for Central European Studies at Leiden University, Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies and Director of the Austria Centre Leiden
About the lecture
We continue to know very little about how the Holocaust happened to a majority of victims and survivors: babies, toddlers, children designated as Jews by Nazi law and those who cared for them during this extraordinary event. This absence of care and inattention to the “invisible work” of caretaking in existing Holocaust histories is surprising, exceptional and intellectually dangerous. Strikingly, the absence of very young children and their caretakers from the stories we write about the Jewish tragedy warps our most basic understanding of the genocidal crimes that unfolded during the 1930s and 1940s, our consequent memories of this genocide and the longer history of early child-rearing across the Jewish experience.
This talk draws from my new book, The Other Holocaust: Care, Children and the Jewish Catastrophe (Under contract Indiana University Press), uses unique and original sources to identify the voices, spaces and materials linked to care of the very young as well as innovative visual, material and conceptual methodologies to systematically visualize how caretakers sustained the youngest victims and the smallest survivors across the World War II and the Holocaust to either the moment of their premature deaths or to their postwar lives. The Other Holocaust reconfigures what we think we know about the Jewish catastrophe and the seemingly-timeless but always-contingent process of nurturing the youngest in our collective midsts across historical time.
About the speaker
Prof. dr. Sarah Cramsey is the Special Chair for Central European Studies at Leiden University, an Assistant Professor of Judaism & Diaspora Studies and Director of the Austria Centre Leiden. From 2025-2030, she will be the Principal Investigator of “A Century of Care: Invisible Work and Early Childcare in central and eastern Europe, 1905-2004” or CARECENTURY, a project funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant. She is a historian of central and eastern Europe, the global Jewish experience throughout historical time and the significant Jewish diasporas unleased from the lands between Berlin and Moscow as a result of the Holocaust, World War II and postwar events. She received her doctorate in late modern European history with a designated emphasis in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014. Since then, she has taught courses on modern European history, central and Eastern Europe, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Tulane University and the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her first book, Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the “Ethnic Revolution” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946, was published by the 'Modern Jewish Experience' series at Indiana University Press in 2023. It was named a Finalist for the "Ernst Fraenkel Prize for the best book on the Holocaust" by the Wiener Library and the 2024 Kulczycki Prize for the Best Book in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Affairs.
Thursday, November 21st
Online Launch
Olena Bezhan Lecture
Olena Bezhan, Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology, National Odesa Mechnikov University
About the speaker
Olena Bezhan is a Ukrainian scholar based at the National Odesa Mechnikov University. She is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Foreign Literature, Faculty of Romance and Germanic Philology. Her research areas include comparative works on the Holocaust and genocide studies in American, late Soviet, and Ukrainian literature, as well as comparative studies on trauma and memory as cultural concepts. Her current research focuses on trauma and memory as socio-cultural constructs and their representations in Holocaust literature. Olena Bezhan received her PhD in comparative literature in 2013 from the University of Dnipro with a dissertation on the Holocaust motifs in American and Russian literature. Dr. Bezhan teaches classical and contemporary foreign literature at the Odesa University. She was a visiting scholar at Polonia Academy in Czestochowa (Poland) in 2020, a senior fellow at Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) (Austria) in 2022–2023, and a nonresidential visiting scholar at Indiana University (USA) in 2023–2024.
