64th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture by Atina Grossmann

About the Lecture

Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe

In the 64th Annual Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, historian Atina Grossmann (Cooper Union) 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.

Note: This event will take place in-person at the Center for Jewish History, and will be live streamed online.

The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture is endowed by Marianne C. Dreyfus and Family, the descendants of Rabbi Leo Baeck