Need help curating a list of Holocaust books for your students or library patrons? What’s on your shelf? What should be there? This podcast episode explores: The most commonly assigned Holocaust books. Why some of them are books you should never assign. Recommendations for books to assign, read, and share. Gaps in the literature. Gatekeepers of higher education. Susan’s wish-list. Our guest is: Susan Kusel, who is the Library Director at Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia. She is also...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 137
Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses have offered us a unique opportunity--a chance to see authors and editors in conversation with each other and themselves about the state and nature of Genocide Studies. Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford University Press, 2022) emerged out of an effort to update and slim down their earlier, larger volume The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies . In the just more than a decade between the two, the field has pushed forward in a variety of directions. Moses and Bloxham have ...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 170
With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she'd grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium. Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other's company...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 327
Since the 1980s the study of genocide has exploded, both historically and geographically, to encompass earlier epochs, other continents, and new cases. The concept of genocide has proved its worth, but that expansion has also compounded the tensions between a rigid legal concept and the manifold realities researchers have discovered. The legal and political benefits that accompany genocide status have also reduced complex discussions of historical events to a simplistic binary - is it genocide o...
Nov 11, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 169
In March 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode, part two of a two-part series, Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination and the possible implications for Rohi...
Nov 11, 2022•21 min•Ep. 155
There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home u...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 168
In March of 2022 the U.S. government announced its determination that genocide was committed by the Myanmar military against Rohingya communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017. What will this mean for the roughly one million Rohingya refugees living in neighboring countries, for Rohingya IDPs in Rakhine State, and for post-coup Myanmar? In this episode Terese Gagnon speaks with Kyaw Zeyar Win about this long-awaited determination. In this conversation we hear from Zeyar about the violent or...
Oct 07, 2022•29 min•Ep. 151
Sara Brown and Stephen Smith have edited a much needed and fascinating compilation of essays on the intersection of religion and mass atrocity. Their intent is not to theorize the relationship, but rather to explore how religious faith, institutions and leaders have participated in, resisted and remembered genocide and mass violence. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (Routledge, 2021) is notable for both for its regional and chronological breadth. There are several ...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 167
In 1930, about 750,000 Jews called Romania home. At the end of World War II, approximately half of them survived. Only recently, after the fall of Communism, are details of the history of the Holocaust in Romania coming to light. In The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2017), Ion Popa explores this history by scrutinizing the role of the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1938 to the present day. Popa unveils and questions whitewashing myths that covered up the role of the chur...
Oct 03, 2022•2 hr 2 min•Ep. 320
Why do people participate in genocide? In The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide (Rutgers UP, 2020), Timothy Williams presents an interdisciplinary model that shows how complex and diverse, but also how ordinary and mundane most motivations for participating in genocide are. The book draws on empirical examples from the Holocaust and Rwanda and introduces new data from interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Cambodia. On my latest episode, we discuss all this and more. Jeff Bachma...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 140
German ambitions to transform Southwest Africa in the early part of the twentieth century were futile and resulted in the widespread death and suffering of indigenous populations. For years colonists wrestled ocean waters, desert landscapes, and widespread aridity as they tried to reach inland in their effort to turn outwardly barren lands into a profitable settler colony. In Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Berghahn Books, 2022), Martin Kalb o...
Sep 21, 2022•54 min•Ep. 139
At the turn of the twentieth century, depictions of the colonized world were prevalent throughout the German metropole. Tobacco advertisements catered to the erotic gaze of imperial enthusiasts with images of Ovaherero girls, and youth magazines allowed children to escape into "exotic domains" where their imaginations could wander freely. While racist beliefs framed such narratives, the abundance of colonial imaginaries nevertheless compelled German citizens and settlers to contemplate the world...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 137
Today I talked to Dr. Mohamed Adhikari about his book Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022). "This book explores settler colonial genocides in a global perspective and over the long durée. It does so systematically and compellingly, as it investigates how settler colonial expansion at times created conditions for genocidal violence, and the ways in which genocide was at times perpetrated on settler colonial frontiers. This volume will prove invaluable to ...
Sep 16, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1264
In recent years, calls for reparations and restorative justice, alongside the rise of populist grievance politics, have demonstrated the stubborn resilience of traumatic memory. From the transnational Black Lives Matter movement's calls for reckoning with the legacy of slavery and racial oppression, to continued efforts to secure recognition of the Armenian genocide or Imperial Japan's human rights abuses, international politics is replete with examples of past violence reasserting itself in the...
Sep 09, 2022•50 min•Ep. 60
In February 1937, following an abortive attack by a handful of insurgents on Mussolini's High Command in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, 'repression squads' of armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenseless residents of Addis Ababa. In three terror-filled days and nights of arson, murder and looting, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were roasted alive, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed to death, or blown to pieces with hand-grenades. Meanwhile the noto...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 1281
Though human rights monitors talk of fact-finding missions and reports, human rights facts are, like all social phenomena, not in fact found but made — through processes by which we come to know and talk about them. But how exactly does that happen? And how, by attending to these processes, might we arrive at a more robust understanding of human rights facts? These are the kinds of questions animating Ken MacLean’s new book, Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production and Myanmar (Uni...
Sep 01, 2022•55 min•Ep. 111
Expo 1967 was the centrepiece of Canada’s 100th birthday. Amid the crowds and the pageantry, one building stood out: The Indians of Canada Pavilion. This was more than a tall glass tipi. It revealed (at least partly) Canada's sordid colonial history, and it challenged the myth of Canada being a peace-loving and tolerant society. We tell the surprising story of the historical experts who put this thing together, and the public's reaction to their work This episode was produced in May 2020 as part...
Aug 18, 2022•55 min•Ep. 24
Adam Jones will be familiar to anyone interested in the field of genocide studies. He's published one of the leading textbooks in the field. He's been influential in drawing attention to the intersection of gender and mass violence. And he's particpated in the emergence of attention to genocides of indigenous peoples over the past decade. Sites of Genocide (Routledge, 2022) is a compilation of Jones' work over the past ten years. The book is comprised of essays, interviews and reflections. Each ...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 166
In research on 'mass killings' such as genocides and campaigns of state terror, the role of ideology is hotly debated. For some scholars, ideologies are crucial in providing the extremist goals and hatreds that motivate ideologically committed people to kill. But many other scholars are skeptical: contending that perpetrators of mass killing rarely seem ideologically committed, and that rational self-interest or powerful forms of social pressure are more important drivers of violence than ideolo...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 165
When I was an undergrad, the chronology of World War One was simple. The war began in August of 1914 and ended in November of 1918. Now, of course, we know it's not that simple. Perhaps (perhaps) it began in 1914. But the violence lingered on well after the armistices of 1918. So did the complicated questions of how to address that violence and the suffering that accompanied it. Amy E. Grubb and Elisabeth Hope Murray are interested precisely in that moment where the official violence had ended b...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 164
In April 1909, two waves of massacres shook the province of Adana, located in the southern Anatolia region of modern-day Turkey, killing more than 20,000 Armenians and 2,000 Muslims. The central Ottoman government failed to prosecute the main culprits, a miscarriage of justice that would have repercussions for years to come. Despite the significance of these events and the extent of violence and destruction, the Adana Massacres are often left out of historical narratives. The Horrors of Adana: R...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 185
The International Association of Genocide Scholars is a global, interdisciplinary, non-partisan organization that seeks to further research and teaching about the nature, causes, and consequences of genocide, and advance policy studies on genocide prevention. The Association, founded in 1994, meets regularly to consider comparative research, important new work, case studies, the links between genocide and other human rights violations, and prevention and punishment of genocide. The Association h...
Jul 29, 2022•21 min•Ep. 74
In his book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), Siniša Malešević emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Malešević shows that o...
Jul 18, 2022•59 min•Ep. 116
Why did some sectors of the Rwandan churches adopt an ambiguous attitude towards the genocide against the Tutsi which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in three months between April and July 1994? What prevented the churches' acceptance that they may have had some responsibility? And how should we account for the efforts made by other sectors of the churches to remember and commemorate the genocide and rebuild pastoral programmes? Drawing on interviews with genocide survivors, Rwandans ...
Jul 17, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 17
Birth, Sex and Abuse: Women's Voices Under Nazi Rule (Grosvenor House, 2015) is a fascinating and gripping examination of birth, sex and abuse during the Nazi era. Dr Chalmers’ unique lens on the Holocaust provides a stunning and controversial exposé of the voices of both Jewish and non-Jewish women living under Nazi rule. Based on twelve years of study, the book takes an inter-disciplinary view incorporating women’s history, Holocaust studies, social sciences and medicine, in a unique, cutting-...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 28
Refuge Must Be Given: Eleanor Roosevelt, the Jewish Plight, and the Founding of Israel (Purdue UP, 2021) details the evolution of Eleanor Roosevelt from someone who harbored negative impressions of Jews to become a leading Gentile champion of Israel in the United States. The book explores, for the first time, Roosevelt's partnership with the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett in seeking to admit more refugees into the United States, and her relationship with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, wh...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 302
In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we have an excerpt from a two day symposium--“Hannah Arendt Right Now”--which explored the philosopher’s impact on the 21st Century. The 2006 event was held on the hundredth anniversary of Arendt’s birth. The focus of this episode is Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem . The session begins with historian Anthony Grafton, whose father, a journalist, once wrote about Arendt. The second speaker is Dr. Rony Brauman, the co-directed The Specialist: Po...
Jul 08, 2022•32 min•Ep. 40
Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and gen...
Jun 29, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 163
In Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (Cambridge UP, 2020), Nathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nat...
Jun 22, 2022•54 min•Ep. 296
Menachem Kaiser's book Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure (Mariner Books, 2021) is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's apartment building in Sosnowiec, Poland. Soon, he is on a circuitous path to encounters with the long-time residents of the building, and with a Polish lawyer known as "The Killer." A surprise discovery--that his grandfather's cousin not only survived the war, but wrote a secret mem...
Jun 14, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 295
