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The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry

Name: The Holocaust as an Interdisciplinary Tapestry
Start: 2023-09-21T14:00:00-04:00
End: 2023-09-21T15:30:00-04:00

Thursday, September 21, 2023 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm EDT

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

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.

Our sixth event in this series will feature a talk on Jewish Studies with Prof Shirli Gilbert (Director, Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre and Prof at UCL), Prof Adam Mendelsohn (Director, Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, UCT) and Prof Yael Siman (Associate Professor, the Iberoamericana University, Mexico)

Shirli Gilbert

Shirli Gilbert is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London and the co-editor of Jewish Historical Studies. She holds a D. Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the Holocaust and its legacies, modern Jewish identity, and Jews in South Africa, and her books include Music in the Holocaust (2005), From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2017) and most recently, with Avril Alba, Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World (2017).

Adam D. Mendelsohn

Adam D. Mendelsohn is Director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town. The Centre, the only of its kind in Africa, conducts research focused on Jews in southern Africa, past and present. He is the co-author of a recent report on racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism on social media in South Africa conducted in collaboration with the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and KAS Media Africa.

Yael Siman

Yael Siman has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She is the academic coordinator of the graduate program in social and political sciences at Iberoamericana University Mexico City. She is a member of the Mexican National Council of Science and an affiliated researcher of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She has investigated the displacement and migration trajectories of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Mexico and is currently working on an edited volume on the Holocaust and Latin America.

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).