UC San Diego Announces 2022-2023 Holocaust Living History Workshop Series

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The University of California San Diego’s Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) is returning this fall with a yearlong series of eight talks that underscore the theme “Rethinking Genocide: Fascism, Exploitation and the Holocaust.” Now in its 14th year, HLHW aims to broaden understanding of the past, foster tolerance and preserve the memory of victims and survivors of the Holocaust. A collaborative effort between the UC San Diego Library and the UC San Diego Jewish Studies Program, the project emphasizes survivors’ continued relevance in the world today.

Each public event focuses on individual as well as group responses to the Holocaust and its long aftermath. The innovative approaches used by featured HLHW presenters demonstrate an incontrovertible fact: the Holocaust continues to engage artists, writers, scholars, survivors and the public. All events are free and open to the public, but registration is required. 

Series Opener

October 12, 2022 | 5 p.m. PT | Virtual: Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II featuring Francine Hirsch

The International Military Tribunal, colloquially known as the Nuremberg Trials, constituted a remarkable conclusion to the “grand alliance,” the tenuous collaboration of the Americans, British, and Soviets to defeat Nazi Germany. For understandable reasons, Westerners tend to see the tribunal through American eyes. A Soviet perspective shifts the focus on a little-known aspect of postwar history: the unexpected contribution of Stalin’s Soviet Union to the development of international law.

In “Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg,” published by Oxford University Press in 2020, Francine Hirsch provides a fresh retelling of the Nuremberg trials and all the participants. The Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor Hirsch earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her first book “Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union” received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Council For European Studies Book Award and was recently published in Russian. Registration is open and required. 

Additional 2022-2023 HLHW Events

• November 2, 2022 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: Eyewitness Djelfa: Daily Life in a Saharan Vichy Labor Camp featuring Aomar Boum
• January 18, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: What’s Fascism Got to Do With it? The Ideological Origins of the Holocaust featuring Federico Finchelstein
• February 8, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | Event Format TBD: The Wave: Experiencing Fascism in the Classroom featuring Joel Dimsdale, Ron Jones, Mark Hancock and Philip Neel 
• March 8, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: Love in the Shadow of Genocide: The Intimate Life of German Jews after the Holocaust featuring Christian Bailey
• March 29, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: Details Forthcoming
• April 26, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: My Name is Staszek Surdel: The Improbable Survival of Nathan Poremba featuring Joel Poremba 
• May 17, 2023 | 5 p.m. PT | In Person: Profits and Persecution: German Big Business and the Holocaust featuring Peter Hayes

In addition to the public lecture series, the HLHW engages local students, teachers, interested community members, and Holocaust survivors and their families through use of USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The Archive is the world’s largest online database of videotaped testimonies by Holocaust survivors and witnesses, and the UC San Diego Library is the only institution in the San Diego region to have access to its resources.

For more information about UC San Diego’s Holocaust Living History Workshop, contact Susanne Hillman at shillman@ucsd.edu. If you have questions or would like to register by phone, contact us at UCSDLibrary@ucsd.edu or (858) 534-0134.