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Annual Lecture: Jonathan Sarna – Re-evaluating the Role of American Jewry During the Shoah
December 4, 2022 @ 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm EST
– Zoom Meeting
The Heidi Urich Annual Lecture on Jewish Genealogy
This lecture is jointly sponsored by the Jewish Genealogical Society
of Greater Boston and Hebrew College
Holocaust scholarship has generally been critical of the role of American Jewry during the Shoah. Many believe that American Jews could have done much more than they did to save the Jews of Europe. However, recent research documents the clandestine rescue of hundreds of thousands of Jews by the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and other agencies, Jewish resistance to German Bund pro-Nazi activities in the U.S., and the work of the Overseas News Agency, the Jewish Labor Committee, and the World Jewish Congress. This new scholarship, Professor Sarna argues, calls for a full-scale re-evaluation of American Jewry’s role in saving Jews and fighting Nazism during the Holocaust years.
Jonathan Sarna is a leading scholar of American Jewish history. His renowned treatise, American Judaism: A History, won the Jewish Book Council’s Book of the Year Award in 2004, and is now available in a 2nd edition. Coming to Terms with America (JPS 2021) is the most recent of his more than thirty books on American Jewish history. He is a University Professor and the Braun Professor of America Jewish History at Brandeis University.