Acts of defiance in Nazi Germany topic of Cornell talk

Wolf Gruner
Gruner

German Jews who stood against the Nazi regime showed courage that still inspires today. Wolf Gruner, director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, will give a lecture, “Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Individual Jewish Reactions to the Persecution in Nazi Germany,” Thursday, March 17, at 5:30 p.m. in 122 Rockefeller Hall. The talk is free, and the public is invited.

The talk, sponsored by Cornell Jewish Studies and the Cornell University Library, is part of a series of events designed to highlight the new accessibility, through Cornell Library, of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. This archive is a collection of 53,000 video testimonies by survivors of the Nazi genocide, as well as the Rwandan genocide, the Nanjing massacre and the Armenian genocide.

Gruner’s talk draws on previously unused local archival sources from various cities, as well as video testimonies. He will demonstrate that German Jews performed many individual acts of defiance and even expressed open protest in public against Nazi persecution starting in 1933 and well into the war.

Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is professor of history at the University of Southern California, and is the founding director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center. He is a specialist in the history of the Holocaust and in comparative genocide studies, and is the author of eight books on the Holocaust, including “Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims,” as well as more than 60 academic articles and book chapters. Gruner’s most recent study, “Outcast of the Fatherland: The Myth of the Liberation of Indigenous Peoples in the Republic of Bolivia 1825-1890,” was published in Spanish in 2015.

For more information, visit http://jewishstudies.cornell.edu/.

Linda B. Glaser is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

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