Helen Cohen Memorial Lecture: The Yiddishe Neshome of Yehuda Bauer’s Historiography
WEBINAR:
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
12pm-1:15pm (US Eastern Time)
7pm-8:15pm (Israel)
The world-renowned Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer has been one of the staunchest and most energetic promotors of the academic field of Genocide Studies worldwide. He is widely associated with interpreting the Shoah within that context, describing it as an unprecedented event—even coining the term “unprecedentedness”—and as the most extreme case of genocide. However, a closer look at his entire oeuvre shows that he was even more so, a historian of Jewish history in addition to being a Holocaust scholar. He sought to answer whether Jewry in modern times—a period defined by a process of secularization—still retained the sense of national solidarity that had been the backbone of Jewish perseverance for centuries, even while scattered throughout the diaspora. As a declared secular Zionist, this question was tied to his own identity and led him to develop a love-hate relationship with the religious dimension of Jewishness. This perspective was also a major factor in his decision to embark on a comprehensive study on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) early in his career.
Yehuda Bauer, undated (JDC Archives, NY_16200)
Dan Michman is Professor (Emeritus) of Modern Jewish History and the former Chair of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan. He is also Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair in Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. His publications, available in twelve languages, cover a broad range of topics on the Shoah, including its historiography, representations, and its impact on Israel, world Jewry, and the Western world as well as modern Jewish history and antisemitism.
Among Professor Michman’s recently (co)-authored and (co)-edited books are Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (A History of the Jewish Community in the Netherlands) (1999); Post-Zionism and the Holocaust: The Role of the Holocaust in the Public Debate on Post-Zionism in Israel (I: 1993–1996, II: 1997–1998) (1997, 2007); Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (2003); Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Belgium (2005); De la mémoire de la Shoah dans le monde juif (2008); Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (2008); The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust (2011); Adolf Hitler, the Decision-Making Process Leading to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Hussayni: The Current State of Research (2017); Getting it Right, Getting it Wrong: Recent Holocaust Scholarship in Light of the Work of Raul Hilberg (2017); Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord face à l’Allemagne nazie (2018); Holocaust Historiography between 1990 to 2021 in Context(s): New Insights, Perceptions, Understandings and Avenues%mdash;An Overview and Analysis (2022); and Jewish Solidarity: The Ideal and the Reality in the Turmoil of the Shoah (2022).
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