Lunchtime Talk by Doris L. Bergen (Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto)

This is a public program. Everyone is welcome. No tickets required.
NOTE: Attendance is limited to the 150 room capacity.

Thurs., Feb. 6, 12:30-1:45 pm

In Person at: Roser Atlas Center 100 [1125 18th St, CU campus]
Zoom Registration: https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/XIpQ1V4dQIeKirazQbV1fA 

Organized by the Singer Chair in Jewish History, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University. Co-sponsored by the Center for African and African American Studies, Departments of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures, History, Linguistics, Women and Gender Studies, and Sociology, as well as the Program in Jewish Studies. The program is also part of CU Boulder's Black History Month events.

What is the relationship between anti-Black racism, antisemitism, sexism, and Nazism? Why did the white supremacists who marched at Charlottesville in 2017 to protest removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee carry swastika flags and shout, "Jews will not replace us?" Why did the number of lynchings in the United States spike in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany? Howard University professor Kelly Miller noted a “striking analogy" between "race prejudice" against Blacks in America and Jews in Germany, and other African American and Caribbean observers at the time expressed similar views. Why have their insights been largely forgotten? This talk addresses these and other questions by looking back at the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and analyzing connections to our own times.

Doris Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of History and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Before coming to the University of Toronto in 2007, she held positions at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Vermont, and she has served as a visiting professor in Jena, Warsaw, Pristina, and Tuzla.

Prof. Bergen's research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. She is the author of several influential works, including Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2023), which was just awarded Yad Vashem's prestigious book prize; War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 4th edition 2024); and Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Bergen is also the (co-)editor of several volumes such as Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich, with Andrea Löw and Anna Hájková (Oldenbourg, 2013) and The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).

Prof. Bergen has held numerous grants and fellowships from the SSHRC and the German Marshall Fund of the United States to the DAAD and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she, among others, was part of the team that designed the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa. Prof. Bergen is a member of many academic committees, including the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.