Book Talk: Saints and Liars by Debórah Dwork

Saints and Liars is a moving history of American relief workers during the Hitler years who sought to save Jews and political opponents targeted by the Nazi regime. Praised by Publishers’ Weekly as “a gripping study of individuals’ operations in terrible extremis,” and selected by Apple Books as a Winter’s Most Anticipated Book, the story historian Debórah Dwork tells arcs through time, place, and situation. From negotiating with government representatives to doing direct (and sometimes secret) refugee relief, aid workers contended with moral questions and fast-changing historical circumstances in their mission to bring people to safety. Drawing on rich archival sources, Saints and Liars offers a glimpse into the lives of people who risked all to help those fleeing persecution.

Author Debórah Dwork, director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – CUNY, will discuss her book with Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish History, NYU.

This event will be held in person at the Center for Jewish History. If you cannot attend the live event, it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

About the Speakers:

Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – CUNY. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the histories she writes. Her award-winning books include Children With A Star; Flight from the Reich; Auschwitz; and Holocaust. Her most recent (January 2025) work, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis, was selected by Apple Books as a Winter’s Most Anticipated Book. Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualized the first doctoral program anywhere in the world specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her books: The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (Indiana, 2011). Her most recent book is Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (Yale, 2020). All of her monographs have been translated into German.