The Jews of Italy in WWII
Monday, April 7, 2025 Noon, Via Webinar
Shira Klein, associate professor and chair of the History Department at Chapman University, works on historical and current antisemitism. Her book Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press) was a finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and has also been published in Hebrew. Her co-authored article “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust” has surpassed 62,000 views, attracted newspaper coverage in a dozen countries, and been translated into Hebrew and Polish. Klein has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, USC Shoah Foundation, and the Barbieri Endowment. She is also a scholar-activist, and co-founder of Academics for Peace.
Genocide in Africa and the Third Reich: Imperialism, Race, and Sexual Violence
Wednesday, April 16, 2025 Noon, Via webinar
Elizabeth R. Baer serves as Research Professor of English and African Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. She currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and has just completed eight years working with the office of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2016-17, she held the position of Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, where she taught courses on gender and genocide. She has also taught courses on the Holocaust at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. Baer has published widely on women’s literature, Holocaust fiction, and memoirs. Her first book, Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Buck of Virginia, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1997, was nominated for the Lincoln Prize. Her second book, The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women (2000), co-edited with Hester Baer, is a critical edition of a memoir originally published in Germany in 1946. She received a Fulbright Award to study the history of Jews in Germany and was the recipient of the Virginia Hamilton Prize for the best essay on multicultural children’s literature.
Key Publications: The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (2017), The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction (2012), Experience and Expression: Women, Nazis, and the Holocaust (2003). Her current research focuses on textile history, including a chapter on a green sweater worn by a girl hiding from the Nazis in the sewers of Lvov, Poland.
State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda
September 2024 to August 2025, Linda Schwab Holocaust Reading Room and Gallery
An exhibition curated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. located in the Linda Schwab Holocaust Reading Room and Gallery in the Madlyn L. Hanes Library. This exhibition, comprised of posters created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, examines the role of Nazi propaganda in various contexts from 1918 to 1948. For more information, please contact Heidi Abbey Moyer, Archivist and Humanities Reference Librarian.