History and Resistance: Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto

A public lecture by Samuel Kassow (Trinity College).

During World War II, Jews resisted not only with guns but also with pen and paper. Even in the face of death, they left “time capsules” full of documents that they buried under the rubble of ghettos and death camps. They were determined that posterity would remember them on the basis of Jewish and not German sources. Thousands of documents were buried in the Ringelblum Archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. Of the 60 people that the Polish Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum recruited to work on this national mission, all but three perished in the Holocaust. The lecture will explore their story. Moderated by Todd Presner.

Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. From 2006 until the present he has been the lead historian for two of the galleries of the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.  Professor Kassow is the author of Students Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917 (University of California Press, 1989), The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry (YIVO, 2003) and Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana, 2007), a book which received the Orbis Prize and which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It has been translated into seven languages. He is also co-editor of Between Tsar and People (Princeton University Press, 1993) and edited “In Those Nightmarish Days: the Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz” (Yale University Press: 2015).

 

Contact [email protected] to RSVP.

This event is sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and cosponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, the 1939 Society, the Samuel Goetz Society Chair in Holocaust Studies, the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies, the UCLA Department of Germanic Languages, the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.