Center Fall Programming Goes Global during the “Zoom Age”
Prof. Amos Goldberg speaking “live” during a Center colloquium from Jerusalem
After a promising test phase with three online events in April, the Center moved its entire Fall’20 program of eleven lectures, survivor testimonies, and colloquia to a ZOOM platform. Back in 2015, the Center had launched a new research colloquium series designed to introduce faculty and students to the latest research in the fields of Jewish, Holocaust, and Peace Studies and to provide them with an opportunity to get feed-back on their own projects from leading scholars in these fields. The online platform enabled us to connect with a range of scholars from Prof. Amos Goldberg (The Hebrew University, Jerusalem), a prominent cultural historian of the Shoah, to Prof. Hank Greenspan (University of Michigan—Ann Arbor), a leading oral historian and expert on Holocaust survivor retellings. The five colloquia, including a program with Appalachian State’s Russianist Prof. Irina Barclay on her edited memoir of a Stalin-era Gulag survivor, were not only well attended. They also attracted scholars from various universities across the US and abroad, who, normally, would not have been able to come to the NC mountains and who greatly enriched our exchanges.
The public presentations for a mixed academic and non-academic audience replicated these dynamics and again connected the participants to intellectuals, scholars, and survivors from Warsaw, Poland, to Jerusalem, Israel, and New York City. As intended, our guests did not shy away from controversial topics, ranging from a conversation about trauma and suffering in the Holocaust and Nakba, the memory politics of PiS, the right-wing populist governing party in Poland, the politics of Christian Evangelicals towards Israel, and new ways to interpret the accounts by Shoah survivors that problematize much-used notions such as “testimony.” The security precautions taken by the Center prevented deniers and white supremacists from disrupting the events (as was the case with some of our partner institutions) and also ensured that a string of charged questions by conservative Polish expats remained within the realm of a productive exchange with Prof. Kostek Gebert, a prominent voice of the small Polish-Jewish community. As much as we missed the face-to-face exchanges and opportunities to meet with a survivor or prominent scholar in person, these online events had many insights and thought-provoking discussions to offer. The Center will continue with this kind of programming with national and global reach in the spring of 2021.
The public presentations for a mixed academic and non-academic audience replicated these dynamics and again connected the participants to intellectuals, scholars, and survivors from Warsaw, Poland, to Jerusalem, Israel, and New York City. As intended, our guests did not shy away from controversial topics, ranging from a conversation about trauma and suffering in the Holocaust and Nakba, the memory politics of PiS, the right-wing populist governing party in Poland, the politics of Christian Evangelicals towards Israel, and new ways to interpret the accounts by Shoah survivors that problematize much-used notions such as “testimony.” The security precautions taken by the Center prevented deniers and white supremacists from disrupting the events (as was the case with some of our partner institutions) and also ensured that a string of charged questions by conservative Polish expats remained within the realm of a productive exchange with Prof. Kostek Gebert, a prominent voice of the small Polish-Jewish community. As much as we missed the face-to-face exchanges and opportunities to meet with a survivor or prominent scholar in person, these online events had many insights and thought-provoking discussions to offer. The Center will continue with this kind of programming with national and global reach in the spring of 2021.