Jewish Refugees in the Global South
New Approaches to Global Transit During the Holocaust
Monday, April 21, 2025, at 11:00 AM PT | 2:00 PM ET
USC Campus, Doheny Memorial Library, Room 240
A public lecture by Atina Grossmann (Professor of History, The Cooper Union)
2024-2025 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence
As Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany traveled throughout the colonial and quasi-colonial Global South, they encountered highly diverse local populations and authorities. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, uprooted Jews were also precariously privileged as white Europeans in non-western, colonial, or semi-colonial societies.
In this distinguished lecture, Professor Atina Grossmann shares exciting new work by herself and a transnational cohort of Holocaust scholars on the ambivalent, paradoxical, and varied experiences, emotions, and memories of Jews who found refuge from National Socialism and the Holocaust in India and Iran after 1933.
From wartime Nazi Berlin throughout the global diaspora, family correspondence and memorabilia of German Jews – as well as archival, literary, visual, and oral history sources – illuminate refugees’ everyday lives in the changing context of interwar fascination and contact with the “Orient,” the global war against fascism, anti-colonial independence movements, and gradual revelations about the destruction of the European world they had escaped.
