In the summer and fall of 1936, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois spent four months in the Third Reich writing correspondence for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper. In contrast to Du Bois’s postwar reflections on fascism in general and Nazism in particular, this correspondence, in its form as serialized columns, produced neither a definitive nor discrete analysis but offered an ambivalent and…
After escaping the Vilna Ghetto and surviving winter in the forest among partisan fighters, Avrom Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow in 1944. The renowned Yiddish poet turned to memoir to detail his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. In his sobering account, Sutzkever details the Nazi occupation and establishment of the ghetto, daily life in the ghetto, and mass killings…
Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. As Russian troops have amassed on Ukraine’s border, talks aimed at resolving the standoff between Russia and NATO appear to have collapsed. Poland’s Foreign Minister warned that “it seems that the risk of war in…
This project examines the causes, nature, and consequences of Italian Jews’ support for imperialism. I argue that between the 1890s and 1930s, Italian Jews took an active part in racializing and controlling indigenous Libyan and Ethiopian Jews. Moreover, by promoting the empire and upholding a racial hierarchy between Europeans and Africans, Italian Jews unwittingly contributed to their own downfall, since…
Abraham Liddell, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University will present the talk “Cape Verde and the Early Modern Black Atlantic” as a part of the lecture series “Charting the Portuguese Black Atlantic” at New York University. More information on this lecture series here. Through Portuguese settlement in the fifteenth century, the Cape Verde islands became a launch base for trade…
Panel Discussion on Zoom This event is part of Giorno della Memoria 2022 In order to participate, RSVP and you will receive an e-mail with your Zoom link by 12pm on February 1 If you don't receive the e-mail by then, contact us at casa.italiana@nyu.edu The Garden of the Finzi-Continis The Novel, the Film, and the Opera On the occasion of the world premiere of…
This lecture will tell the story of a long-overlooked Ottoman Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing extensively on a rich body of previously untapped Ladino archival material, the lecture will also offer a new read on Jewish modernity. Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow…
Professor Jonathan Haslam will discuss his most recent book, The Spectre of War. International Communism and the Origins of World War II, which explores the roots of the Second World War in the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the interwar period. Jonathan Haslam retired as George F. Kennan Professor at the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study last July. He…
Opera arrived in America as a European import, with Jews playing an essential role in its promotion from the moment Lorenzo da Ponte landed in Philadelphia. A century later, a generation of European refugees would take their operatic experience and use it to develop two of the most quintessentially American art forms: the Hollywood movie and the Broadway musical. But,…
In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to…
