Prominent Israeli Historian on the German Jewish Experience in the Third Reich

Monday, April 15, 2024
5:00 – 7:00pm (MT)
In person at CU Boulder Campus
CASE Building, Rooms W410 / W411
and streaming on Zoom (please register well in advance)

The campus and general community are invited to a discussion of the path-breaking work on the German Jewish experience in the Third Reich by Professor Guy Miron (Open University, Israel). Miron will discuss his study of the significance of space and time in German Jewish life and responses to persecution in Nazi Germany with Professor Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, interim director of CU Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies.

Miron presents a new history of how the Nazi era upended German Jewish experiences of space and time. The speaker considers how social exclusion, economic decline, physical relocation—and later, forced evictions—labor and deportation under Nazi rule forever changed German Jews’ experience of space and time. Facing ever-mounting restrictions, German Jews reimagined their worlds—devising new relationships to traditional and personal space, new interpretations of their histories and even new calendars to measure their days. For Miron, these tactics reveal a Jewish community’s attachment to German bourgeois life as well as their defiant resilience under Nazi persecution.

Miron is the vice president for academic affairs at the Open University of Israel and a member of the department of history, philosophy and Judaic studies. He is also the director of the Research Center for the Study and Research of the Holocaust in Germany at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

His research focuses on German and Central European Jewish history in the 20th century; Hungarian Jewish history; Jewish and Israeli historiography. His first book in English, The Waning of the Emancipation, Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary, was published in 2011. In 2023, his new book, Space and Time Under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich, was published be the University of Chicago Press. Miron has also co-edited the volume Antisemitism and the Politics of History (Brandeis University Press, 2023).

The event is organized by the Program in Jewish Studies and the Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History. It is co-sponsored by CU Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts and CU’s departments of History, Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Sociology.

Free of charge and no tickets required. For more information, please contact the Program in Jewish Studies at CUJewishStudies@colorado.edu.