International symposium to address relationship between Holocaust and genocide studies

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is partnering to present the international symposium "Bridging the Divide in Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Towards a Cross-Cultural Interdisciplinary Dialogue" to take place June 12 - 14 at Haifa University in Israel. Moving beyond ethically loaded debates surrounding definitions of Holocaust and genocide and the limits of comparison, the symposium will explore the way Holocaust-based discourse, tropes, and commemorative practice inform and/or are incongruent with diverse experiences of global mass violence in everyday life. Highlighting a hermeneutic and ethnographic approach, transcultural psychological, historically and politically contextualized studies will examine the dialectic between universal and particular lived experiences of genocide and mass violence and its aftermath.

Speakers from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute include: Stephen D. Smith, Executive Director; Karen Jungblut, Director of Research and Documentation; and Dan Leshem, Associate Director of Research. Also speaking is Wolf Gruner, Professor of History and Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at University of Southern California.

The symposium is presented in partnership with University of Haifa Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research; Gerda Henkel Stiftung; The Israeli Mosaic; USC Shoah Foundation Institute; and the University of Southern California's David and Dana Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

For more information, contact Carol A. Kidron, Sociology and Anthropology Department at ckidron@soc.haifa.ac.il or Yael Granot-Bein, Strochlitz Institute at ygranot@univ.haifa.ac.il.

Program_Bridging the Divide in Holocaust and Genocide Studies Symposium.pdf