- This event has passed.
The War Against Ukraine through a lens of culture and history
Monday, April 11, 2022 @ 3:00 pm EDT
On February 24, 2022 Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. It has caused a loss of life and destruction while uprooting hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. The refugee crisis has quickly become monumental as neighboring countries scramble to provide necessary humanitarian needs. History and especially history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations have been cited in proclamations leading up to the attack. How do we untangle this propaganda campaign? What was the path that led to building an independent Ukrainian state?
How did we get here?
What will it take to constrain the aggression?
What does this mean for diplomacy and peace?
Join CWB Scholar Natalia Aleksiun and an esteemed panel of scholars and eyewitnesses as we examine this crisis and the consequences across Europe and the World.
Natalia Aleksiun
Natalia Aleksiun is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York. She has received many prestigious fellowships. She published a monograph titled Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 and a critical edition of Gershon Taffet’s Destruction of the Jewish Community of Żółkiew and coedited the 20th volume of Polin, devoted to the memory of the Holocaust and the 29th volume titled Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe. Her book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust will be published with Littman in early 2020. She is currently working on a new book about the so-called cadaver affair at European Universities in the 1920s and 1930s and on a project dealing with daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust.
Omer Bartov
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, Professor of German Studies Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Omer Bartov’s early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, and Hitler’s Army. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany’s War and the Holocaust. Bartov’s interest in representation also led to his study, The “Jew” in Cinema, which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. His more recent work has focused on interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. His book Erased (2007) investigates the politics of memory in West Ukraine, while his most recent monograph, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018) is a microhistory of ethnic coexistence and violence. The book received the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, among others, and has been translated into several languages. Bartov has just completed a new monograph, tentatively titled Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Past. His many edited volumes include Voices on War and Genocide: Three Accounts of the World Wars in a Galician Town (2020) and, reflecting his new interest, the forthcoming Israel/Palestine: Lands and Peoples.
Marta Havryshko
Dr. Marta Havryshko holds a PhD in History from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine). She is currently Research Associate at the Department of Contemporary History of the I. Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her research interests are primarily focused on sexual violence during World War II and the Holocaust, women’s history, feminism, and nationalism. Her recent publications include a book, Overcoming Silence: Women’s War Stories (2018), as well as articles such as, “Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Sexual Violence during Soviet Counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine (1944-1953)” in Euxeinos. Governance and Culture in the Black Sea Region, 9 (2019); “Rape in Hiding: Sexual Violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine” in Holokost i Suchasnist, 17 (2019, In Ukrainian); and, “Love and Sex in Wartime: Controlling Women’s Sexuality in the Ukrainian Nationalist Underground” in Aspasia, 12 (2018). Dr. Havryshko’s research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD), Yahad-In Unum, Monash University, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, St. Gallen University, amongst others.
Dr. Havryshko was awarded a 2019-2020 Diane and Howard Wohl Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for her research project, “Gender and the Holocaust: Sexual Violence against Jewish Women in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.” This project applies a feminist perspective, placing gender at the forefront of analysis, and aims to provide space for women’s voices about their sexual victimization and agency.
Monday March 28th, 2022: Featuring Elissa Bemporad and Dr. Vladyslava Moskalets
Monday April 4th, 2022 Featuring Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler and Dr. Olena Palko
In partnership with the Jack Buncher Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at Carnegie Mellon University
