2020 Annual Toby & Saul Reichert Holocaust Lecture:
"Defiance and Protest: Forgotten Individual Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany"

with Dr. Wolf Gruner, University of Southern California

About our speaker:
Wolf Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008 and is the Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014.

He is a specialist in the history of the Holocaust and in comparative genocide studies. He received his PhD in History in 1994 as well as his Habilitation in 2006 from the Technical University Berlin. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness at Webster University in St. Louis.

He is the author of ten books on the Holocaust, among them “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims”, with Cambridge University Press (paperback 2008). He also published „Parias de la Patria“. El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890”, in Spanish with Plural Editores 2015. Gruner’s most recent book is The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses (Berghahn 2019) The original German version with Wallstein 2016 received the award for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social sciences in 2017, the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association 2017 for the best book in Holocaust Studies in 2015-2016 and was a finalist for the Yad Vashem International Book prize for Holocaust Research 2017. The book was published in Czech 2019 and is forthcoming in Hebrew 2020.

He coedited four books, including „Resisting Persecution. Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust” (Berghahn 2020), “ New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” (Purdue UP 2019), and“The Greater German Reich and the Jews. Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935-1945” (Berghahn 2015).

He is currently finishing the manuscript of an exciting book about forgotten acts of individual defiance, protest and resistance of German and Austrian Jews during the Holocaust. This book for a broader public will feature the life stories of five Jewish men and women who defied or protested against persecution in Nazi Germany. By exploring additional courageou acts, the book will demonstrate the wide range of individual resistance.

He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (since 2017), the executive committee of the Consortium of Higher Education Centers of Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies (since 2018), the International Academic Advisory board of the Center for the Research on the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem (since 2012), and the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research (since 2010).

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