University student government leaders who participated in the Institute's inaugural Intercollegiate Diversity Congress reflect on the impact of testimony to counter antisemitism, racism and other forms of hate.

Gisela Golombek’s Jewish family had immigrated to the Philippines via Britain after fleeing Nazi Germany just before the war. On Dec. 8, 1941 – the same day as Pearl Harbor – Japan attacked Manila. The 9-year-old Golombek and her family were among the thousands of Americans and Europeans rounded up from Manila homes. They were imprisoned at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.  

Martina Kessel's research examines the meaning and role of humor as an identity practice in Germany during the time of National Socialism in Germany. In this lecture, she explores the theory that non-Jewish Germans disguised violence as 'art' to justify their failure to comply with international or humanitarian beliefs.

In this lecture, Kimberly Cheng aims to write Central European Jewish refugees back into the changing landscape of postwar Shanghai by examining the ways in which Jewish refugees and Chinese locals perceived and interacted with each other. In particular, she will explore the impact of the arrival of American forces on Sino-Jewish relations on the ground in the immediate postwar period.

In this lecture, Professor Geoffrey Robinson (UCLA) discusses his newest book, The Killing Season. The Killing Season examines one of the largest and swiftest instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century—the shocking anti-leftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965–66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention.