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Cultural Genocide and the Destruction of Central and Eastern European Jewish Heritage During the Holocaust
Yom HaShoah Lecture 2023/5783
Monday, April 17
1:00 – 3:00pm (MT)
Boulder Jewish Community Center
6007 Oregon Ave, Boulder, CO
In-Person and Virtual
For those who cannot attend in-person, a Live Stream option will be provided closer to the event.
The Boulder JCC and the Endowed Singer Chair in Jewish History invite the public to a lecture by Prof. Dorota Glowacka (King’s College, Halifax). The program is co-sponsored by CUB’s Program in Jewish Studies, the Center for Humanities & the Arts and the Department of History. It is followed by a short ceremony to further commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.
The Nazi campaign of annihilation during WW II targeted not only Jewish lives but also Jewish cultural heritage and traditions. In her presentation, Glowacka will focus on Hitler’s deliberate destruction of Eastern European Jewish cultural and religious institutions, literature, and language. She will also reflect on how that destruction has been commemorated in North America, drawing attention to its frequent descriptions as “a vanished world,” as exemplified in Roman Vishniac photographs. As some genocide scholars as well as North American Indigenous thinkers have argued, in his conquest of Eastern Europe Hitler borrowed from ideologies and methods previously used by colonial powers in North America. Glowacka draws on these insights in order to both highlight the scope of the destruction of Eastern European Jewish culture and to critique its monolithic remembrance as “a vanished world.” As a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Glowacka situates her research in the context of her family’s history.
