The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry

An 8 Part Series exploring the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through unique and previously unexplored lenses

Our 3rd Session will feature

Why Should We Care?

The Holocaust and Public Humanities

with Professor Björn Krondorfer 

Classrooms Without Borders, in coordination with Tali Nates, Founder and Director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Madene Shachar, Director, “Talking Memory” online lecture series & International Educational Programs the Ghetto Fighters’ House, Esther Toporek Finder, member of the GSI Coordinating Council, Generations of the Shoah and in partnership with Liberation75 is pleased to embark on this new innovative series “The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry”.

This 8 part series will engage with scholars and experts who grapple with themes related to Holocaust studies. The series will explore the multifaceted discipline of Holocaust Studies through different lenses. The series will include scholars whose research and publications shed new light in this field of study that continues to grow and develop. Our experts will challenge us to understand the causes, impacts, and legacies of the Holocaust.

While we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we want to stay alert to the fact that for students learning about it today, this history is more than three generations ago. We should not assume that either students, teachers or the general public easily connect to the history and legacy of the Holocaust. Krondorfer will talk about his experiences with Public Humanities projects that help to connect us to the Holocaust.

Prof Bjorn Krondorfer

Björn Krondorfer is Regents’ Professor and the Director of the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University. As Endowed Professor of Religious Studies, he also teaches in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. at Temple University, Philadelphia. His field of expertise is religion, gender, and culture, and (post-) Holocaust and reconciliation studies. His scholarship helped to define the field of Critical Men’s Studies in Religions.

In 2007-08, he was guest professor at the Institute of Theology and the History of Religion at the Freie University Berlin, Germany, and he held the status of visiting Faculty Affiliate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He received a Senior Research Fellowship at the Vrije University in Amsterdam (2016/2017) and is the recipient of the Norton Dodge Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievements. He is currently the VP of the “Association of Public Religious and Intellectual Life” (APRIL) and in 2020 was elected chair of the “Consortium of Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies.” He has been invited to speak, present his research, and facilitate intercultural seminars in Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Israel & Palestine, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States

As director of the Martin-Springer Institute, he has organized several international academic symposia. He has mentored the creation of several exhibits: Through the Eyes of Youth: Life and Death in the Bedzin Ghetto; Resilience: Women in Flagstaff’s Past and Present; and the permanent installation of a Berlin Wall exhibit at NAU. He has curated the art exhibitions Wounded Landscapes (2014) and Echoes of Loss: Artistic Responses to Trauma (2018). In 2019, he has been awarded a one-month residential fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute on the theme of “truth and reconciliation.”

Tali Nates

Tali Nates is the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre (JHGC) and Chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation (SAHGF). She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust and genocide education, memory, reconciliation, and human rights. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, her father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler. Tali has been involved in the creation and production of dozens of documentary films, published many articles and contributed chapters to different books among them God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (2015), Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings (2018), Conceptualizing Mass Violence, Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (2021) and The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023).

In 2021 she was part of the 12-member Expert Group of the Malmö Forum, serving in an advisory capacity to the Secretariat of the Malmö Forum on their programme on Holocaust remembrance, education and actions to combat antisemitism. Tali serves on many Advisory and Academic Boards including that of the Contested Histories Initiative, the Interdisciplinary Academic Journal of Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and the Academic Advisory Group of the School of Social and Health Sciences, Monash University (IIEMSA), South Africa.

In 2010, Tali was chosen as one of the top 100 newsworthy and noteworthy women in

South Africa by the Mail & Guardian newspaper and won many awards including the Kia Community Service Award (South Africa, 2015), the Gratias Agit Award (2020, Czech Republic), the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award (2021) and the Goethe Medal (2022, Germany).

Thank you to our Partners

Future Events in this Series: 

• May 18 2023 Film
• June 15 2023 Police and Military
• September 21 2023 Judaic Studies
• October 26 2023 Gender Studies
• November 16 2023 TBC

Past Events in this Series:

• February 23, 2023 Dr. Robert Krell Discussion on Psychiatry and the Holocaust
• March 23 2023 Eli M. Rosenbaum and Dr. Tamir Hod  on Achieving Legal Accountability for WWII Nazi Crimes: Experiences of the Israel National Police and US Department of Justice