MEDIA ADVISORY
New York University will host “Jewish Relief Organizations in Pre-War Europe” on Wed., April 16 and Thurs., April 17 at NYU’s Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life (7 East 10th St., between 5th Ave. and University Place). This workshop is free and open to the public. For more information, call 212.998.8980. [Subway Lines: A, B, C, D, E, F, V (West 4th Street); R, W (8th Street); 6 (Astor Place)]
For a complete schedule of sessions, go to: http://hebrewjudaic.as.nyu.edu/page/newsevents
Speakers include the following: David Engel, a professor of Holocaust Studies in NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; Sam Johnson, a professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London; Nahum Karlinsky, a social and economic historian at Ben-Gurion University; Gudrun Maierhof, author of Self-Assertion Under Chaos, a study of Jewish women living under the Third Reich; Valery Dymshits, director of the Center Petersburg Judaica in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Ronald Zweig, director of NYU’s Taub Center for Israel Studies.
Scholars around the globe and across many disciplines have studied the activities of Jewish relief organizations (JROs) before the outbreak of World War II. Existing research has typically focused on specific relief organizations and their operations at the local, national, or international level. However, researchers on JROs have tended to work in isolation from one another, so their efforts have not yet had a notable impact upon the dominant perceptions of modern Jewish history and society. The workshop is designed to bring together scholars from around the world in order to generate cross-organizational and inter-regional comparisons of JROs. Such an analysis, emphasizing the historical, political, and social context of organized Jewish relief activities, will illuminate a significant feature of modern Jewish life that has remained on the periphery of the Jewish scholarly agenda.
Reporters interested in attending the event should contact James Devitt, NYU’s Office of Public Affairs, at 212.998.6808 or james.devitt@nyu.edu.
The event is co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, World ORT, and Leonid Nevzlin Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.