Wolf Gruner Gives Lecture and PhD Workshop at Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies

Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, continues his two-month residence at the Berlin-Brandenurg Center for Jewish Studies with a lecture about Jewish resistance and a Visual History Archive workshop for researchers next Thursday, July 9.

The German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD) awarded Gruner a research grant at the Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies, which is a joint project of Humboldt-Universität, Freie Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, Universität Potsdam, the Abraham Geiger Kolleg, and the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies. Gruner will be in residence June 1 to July 31, 2015.

His public lecture on July 9, 6-8 p.m., is “Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Reactions of German Jews to the National Socialist Persecution 1933-45.” Gruner will draw on his research in the Visual History Archive and other sources to challenge the notion that Jews were passive victims during the Holocaust. Instead, he argues, Jews performed many acts of resistance and even protested openly against Nazi persecution as early as 1933. However, because many of them were killed, their acts of resistance have been mostly forgotten.

Immediately preceding the lecture, Gruner will host a two-hour workshop for PhD students about the Visual History Archive and its possibilities and limitations for research.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Jewish Studies facilitates the development of networks in transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to history, philosophy, Jewish studies, theology, literature and music, art history, and ancient history; and it supports the training of young scholars in the field of Jewish studies, Judeo-Christian and Muslim-Jewish-Christian exchange, and museums and memorial sites.