Department of
History

Thursday, March 18, 7 p.m.

Christopher Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, will return to PLU to give the annual Raphael Lemkin Lecture on the topic of "Holocaust History and Survivor Testimony: Challenges, Limitations and Opportunities." Browning is well known at PLU, having taught in the History Department from 1974 to 1999. In that twenty-five-year period he established an international reputation and raised the profile of Holocaust studies at PLU to a very high level. He is author of the groundbreaking book, Ordinary Men (1992), which is used in Holocaust courses throughout the world. This lecture will draw upon the latest of his many books, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (2010).

Friday, March 19

Sara Horowitz, Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Canada, is the author of many publications, including Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (1996). She is an expert on women and the Holocaust and will base her talk on a forthcoming book, Gender, Genocide and Jewish Memory.

Tomaz Jardim, Revson Fellow, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Jardim will talk on "Ambiguous Justice: The Mauthausen SS before American Military Commission Courts," based on his recently completed Ph.D thesis at the University of Toronto. He will speak on Friday. This trial, which involved more than sixty perpetrators from one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, has remained virtually absent from the historiography of the Holocaust. He is fluent in German.

Jennifer Jenkins, Professor of German, Pacific Lutheran University. Jenkins will be part of the panel discussion on "Women, Literature, Jewish Emigres and Jewish Identity" on Friday. She has a Ph.D. in modern German literature and culture from the University of Wisconsin. Her area of emphasis is 18th and 20th century German literature, Hermann Broch, Peter Weiss, aesthetics, modern Scandinavian literatures and Dutch and Flemish literature.

Rona Kaufman, Associate professor of English at PLU, Rona will be part of the "Jewish Literacies in the Holocaust" panel, talking about a cookbook compiled by women in the Terezin concentration camp.  She published an earlier version of this talk, titled "Testifying, Silencing, Monumentalizing, Swallowing: Coming to Terms with In Memory's Kitchen" in the Journal of Advanced Composition.  She's currently working on a book called Kitchen Judaisms that examines ways Jewish women in America have written, published, and used recipes and cookbooks in order to navigate local and regional cultures.  Rona received her Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan and teaches classes in creative nonfiction, composition, rhetoric, literacy, and the English language.

Judith Kay, Associate Professor of Ethics, University of Puget Sound. Kay will moderate the discussion of "Gender, Genocide and the Jewish Memory" and "Women, Literature, Jewish Emigres and Jewish Identity" in Friday's afternoon sessions. She teaches in the area of religion including courses on Lies and Secrets, Think Ethically, and Heroes Integrity. Her research area is moral psychology under the rubric of virtues and vices. She is also interested in the moral psychology of victims and victimizers, particularly how people respond to violence. Her most recent book, Murdering Myths: The Story Behind the Death Penaltygoes beyond the hype and statistics to examine American's deep-seated allegiance to a story that justifies violence as a means of justice.  Kay is an expert on the ethical issues involved in the death penalty in the United States. She also studies anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.

Lisa Marcus, is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at PLU, where she teaches courses in American ethnic literatures and feminist and gender studies.  Marcus is currently working on a sabbatical project on fictions of Jewishness in American Literature.  A chapter from that project - May Jews Go to College?:  Fictions of Jewishness in the 1920's- has been published in Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries:  Representing Jews, Jewishness and Modern Culture (2008).  The talk she will present emerges from her fascination with the new historical American Girl doll, Rebecca Rubin, whose story is set in 1914, the year her own grandmother immigrated to New York's Lower East Side through Ellis Island. Marcus received her PhD from Rutgers University.

Kurt Mayer, Tacoma businessman, philanthropist and community leader, Mayer, has written a rags to riches story of his life and times. "My Personal Brush with History," written with Joe Peterson, is a story of hardship, opportunity, triumphs, mistakes, family and faith. “My book is intended to give my grandchildren – ages 12, 10 and 8 – an opportunity to read, later in life, about what many believe has been an incredible journey,” said Mayer, a PLU Regent from 1995 to 2005. Mayer was instrumental in the development of the university’s Holocaust Studies Program.

James Waller will speak Friday evening as we announce and celebrate the winners of this year’s Raphael Lemkin Student Essay Contest. The two winning students will also present their work. Waller, an Auxiliary Scholar with the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, is the author of Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Mass Murder and Genocide (2002). This book provides an important psychological perspective on the “ordinary men” described by Christopher Browning, as well as on the perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere.

Saturday, March 20

Victoria Barnett, Director of Church Relations United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will talk on Bystanders-Lessons and Implications. She is a graduate of Indiana University and Union Theological Seminary, New York (M. Div.). She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999), and editor/translator of Wolfgang Gerlach’s And the Witnesses were Silent: the Confessing Church and the Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Fortress Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the churches during the Holocaust. She is also coeditor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works project, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer’s complete works.

Nick Coddington, an award-winning teacher of Holocaust and genocide studies at Charles Wright Academy, will describe the program of classes and international exchange which he has developed there. Prior to beginning his teaching career, Nick served as an officer in the US Army for more than 20 years.  He has extensive experience working with humanitarian and relief operations involving the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), non- governmental organizations and multiple countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and South West Asia. In 2007 he was honored as the National Holocaust Educator of the Year. In 2008 he received the Spirit of Anne Frank Award.

John Conway,  professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, is author of the path-breaking book, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (1968). He is a founding member of the Scholars' Conference on the German Church and the Holocaust, a founding member of the German Studies Association, and a founding member of the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. He has specialized on the role of German Churches and the Vatican during the Third Reich and on Jewish-Christian relations in the twentieth century. He is also founding editor of an online newsletter under the title, Association of Contemporary Church Historians.

Robert Ericksen is the author of Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (1985), which has also been turned into a documentary film (Vitalvisuals.com, 2005). He has edited three books, including Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (co-edited with Susannah Heschel, 1999). He is a founding member of the Board of Editors of Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte and sits on the Church Relations Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he gave the annual Meyerhof Lecture in 2007. He also gave the Kaplan Holocaust Lectures at Cape Town University in 2004. In October 2007, Professor Ericksen was named PLU's Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies.

Emily Marks will present the results of her summer project as the first Kurt Mayer Summer Student Fellowship winner. Marks, '10, was the Raphael Lemkin Essay winner last year. Marks hopes to pursue a Ph.D and ultimately teach. Lemkin was an international lawyer who initiated the term genocide and in 1948 succeeded in persuading the United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention which outlawed the destruction of races and groups. Marks began her essay "Identity and Genocide: The Armenian Genocide and the Role of Turkish National Identity" by redefining genocide.

John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught from 1966 through 2006.  In 2007-2008, he served as the Robert and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.  In addition to service on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and on the editorial board for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has published hundreds of articles and reviews and authored, co-authored, or edited more than forty books.

Carl Wilkens, As a humanitarian aid worker, Wilkens moved his young family to Rwanda in the spring of 1990. When the genocide was launched in April 1994, he refused to leave, even when urged to do so by close friends, his church and the United States government. Thousands of expatriates evacuated and the United Nations pulled out most of its troops. Carl was the only American to remain in the country. Venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire, he worked his way through roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers and civilians armed with machetes and assault rifles in order to bring food, water and medicine to groups of orphans trapped around the city. His actions saved the lives of hundreds.