October 2010 Archives

NPR News
by ERIC WESTERVELT

During the Third Reich, Germany's foreign ministry staff across Europe cooperated in the mass murder of Jews and others, according to a government-sponsored study released Thursday in Berlin.

The report says German diplomats during the Nazi era were far more deeply involved in the Holocaust than previously acknowledged. It also shows how West German diplomats after the war worked to whitewash history and create a myth of resistance and opposition to Nazi rule.

Yesterday we posted an article about Academic Freedom and the Holocaust in regards to the statements made by Kaukab Siddique, associate professor of English and journalism at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. Today's article deals with the community's reaction to the professor and his statements.

Philadelphia Inquirer
By Jeremy Roebuck
Inquirer Staff Writer
October 28, 2010

The head of the Pennsylvania Board of Education this week joined a growing list of protesters urging Lincoln University to reconsider the tenure of a professor who has questioned the Holocaust and urged the overthrow of Israel's government.

Calling professor Kaukab Siddique's recent statements "disgraceful," board Chairman Joseph M. Torsella called on the Chester County school to repudiate the instructor's views and investigate whether campus resources have been used to support his cause.

Inside Higher Ed
By Dan Berrett

October 26, 2010

A Pennsylvania English professor whose anti-Israel rhetoric and denial of the Holocaust as a historic certainty have ignited controversy is citing academic freedom as his defense.

Kaukab Siddique, associate professor of English and journalism at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, appeared last month at a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington, where he called the state of Israel illegitimate. "I say to the Muslims, 'Dear brothers and sisters, unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism,' " he said at a rally on Sept. 3. "Each one of us is their target and we must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel -- if possible by peaceful means," he added.

Review of new important work about the Armenian Genocide
Copies available for loan at CHGS

Chigago Tribune Book Review

Carlin Romano
Special to the Tribune

"Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-18"
By Grigoris Balakian
Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag
Alfred A. Knopf. 509 pp. $35

Armenian Golgotha is the astonishing memoir of Father Grigoris Balakian (1876-1934), a work from the 1920s shepherded into English by his great nephew Peter Balakian, the leading American expert on the ARMENIAN genocide. Grigoris Balakian witnessed the genocide from many angles and swore to document it if he survived. According to his great-nephew, Grigoris Balakian at times "lived like an animal" in order to do so.

With the approach of Armenian Remembrance Day, a commemoration held worldwide on April 24, Americans would be well-advised to read this memoir, which recognizes the Ottoman Empire's targeted killing of its Armenian citizens from 1915 to 1918 as genocide. Turkish soldiers, government-organized death squads and ordinary Turks, acting under orders and incitements from Ottoman Minister of the Interior Mehmet Talaat, massacred -- indeed, sometimes literally hacked to pieces -- up to 1.5 million Armenians.

National Public Radio
by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK October 18, 2010, 08:41 am ET

The Nazis stripped hundreds of thousands of artworks from Jews during World War II in one of the biggest cultural raids in history, often photographing their spoils and meticulously cataloguing them on typewritten index cards.

Holocaust survivors and their relatives, as well as art collectors and museums, can go online beginning Monday to search a free historical database of more than 20,000 art objects stolen in Germany-occupied France and Belgium from 1940 to 1944, including paintings by Claude Monet and Marc Chagall.

Bruno Chaouat, director

It was recently announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that Jean-Luc Godard, the Swiss-French filmmaker, will receive an honorary Oscar at this year's ceremony (see article from Jewish Journal posted by CHGS on October 16th, 2010). With this announcement came articles, blog posts and op-eds referring to the filmmaker's real or alleged anti-Semitism.

It is important for the world of scholarship to connect with current events, and we post these articles in order to examine these events with a sense of nuance and depth that the complexity of culture and history requires. While journalism often makes the complexity of the world accessible at the cost of simplifying it, the mission of an academic center such as ours is to approach this complexity with rigor, scientific and intellectual integrity and without sensationalizing.

It is particularly timely that Professor Philip Watts from Columbia University will speak in April about Godard, WWII, the Jews and the Holocaust at CHGS's lecture series, "Alternative Narratives or Denial?" Professor Watts will examine portions of Godard's work and discuss how his history may have shaped and informed his cinematographic choices which have led to the anti-Semitic charges.

We look forward to this exchange, and will continue to look at current events and provide a platform to lead us into deeper inquiry beyond the headlines.

(AP) - 5 hours ago

BERLIN (AP) -- A German Jewish leader welcomed a new exhibition in Berlin exploring the Adolf Hitler personality cult that helped the Nazis win and hold power, saying Friday that it takes a good approach to a difficult issue.

"Hitler and the Germans -- Nation and Crime," which runs through Feb. 6 at the German Historical Museum, is the first exhibition in the capital to focus so firmly on Hitler's role -- another step in the erosion of taboos concerning depictions of the Nazi era.

by Alexandra Brangeon
13 October 2010
Allafrica.com

Rwanda has welcomed France's arrest of rebel leader Callixte Mbarushimana who is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rwanda's Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama told RFI on Wednesday that it was a "step in the right direction". Survivors of the genocide said that this should not mean that his role in Rwandan genocide should be forgotten.

Thursday, November 4 at 7:00p.m.
Sunday, November 7 at 6:30p.m.

Followed by a question and answer session with filmmaker Michael Prazan
Moderated by Rembert Hueser
Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch Studies
and Moving Image Studies

St. Anthony Main Theater
115 Main St SE
Minneapolis
Tickets: $6.00 students /senior $8.50 general admission

CHGS will explore this question more in depth during our lecture series "Alternative Narratives or Denial?" in March and April of 2011. check our web site for updates and information coming soon.

October 6, 2010
Is Jean-Luc Godard an anti-Semite?
Jean-Luc Godard to get honorary Oscar, questions of anti-Semitism remain
By Tom Tugend
JewishJournal.com

Hollywood's Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that it will bestow an honorary Oscar on iconic Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard on Nov. 13.The announcement has raised a new question and revived an old one. First, will Godard show up to accept the award? Second, is he an anti-Semite?

Both questions can be answered with a categorical "maybe yes or maybe no." Godard, who will mark his 80th birthday in December, is one of the originators, and among the last survivors, of the French New Wave cinema, which he helped kick-start in 1960 with "Breathless," still his best-known work.

Haaretz.com

In a major new study, Daniel Blatman argues that on the Nazi death marches constituted a completely new stage in the history of the German genocide - in which murderous chaos had the upper hand.

By By Boaz Neumann

The Death Marches
The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, by Daniel Blatman Yad Vashem Publications (in Hebrew ), 666 pages, NIS 98. Forthcoming in English in January 2011 (translation by Chaya Galai ) from the Belknap Press of Harvard University, 524 pages, $35

It's hard to come up with a new historical thesis about the Holocaust or Nazism, fields of study that are already jam-packed with researchers. But groundbreaking studies do appear every now and then, studies that offer a different interpretation of familiar historical events and can change the way we understand history. Daniel Blatman's "The Death Marches" is such a work.

Haaretz.com

Both Tom Segev and Guy Walters see Simon Wiesenthal as all-too-human - that is, as flawed - but whereas the latter judges the Nazi hunter with unusual harshness, Segev's biography is insightful and nuanced, as well as extremely thorough.

By Michael Berenbaum

The Life and Legends, by Tom Segev Doubleday, 457 pages, $35
Hunting Evil:

The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, by Guy Walters Broadway Books, 518 pages, $27

Anyone dealing with the Holocaust is acutely aware of the passage of time. Soon, all too soon, the last survivor will be no longer. Soon too, though not soon enough, the last of the perpetrators will also be gone. The Angel of Death has outpaced the machinery of justice. The U.S. Justice Department has changed the mission of its Office of Special Investigations to include perpetrators of other genocides; it is not for naught that the last Israeli Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, has termed his most recent efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice "Operation Last Chance." It is now or never.

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies invites you to an Open House
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 4:00pm-7:00pm Room 760 Social Science Building, 267 19th Ave. S. University of Minnesota.

Join us for a tour of our new offices and resource library, learn about upcoming programs, and meet new director Bruno Chaouat and the CHGS staff.

Wine and light refreshments will be served. We look forward to meeting you.

To RSVP or for more information please contact us at 612-624-0256 or e-mail chgs@umn.edu

Parking is available in the 19th Ave. Ramp (300 19th Ave. S.) and the 21st Ave. Ramp (400 21st Ave. S.)

Leading Nazi hunter: Phillippe Petain, head of French government during Nazi era, personally penciled harsher measures onto already discriminatory legislation.

By Reuters

The head of the French government which collaborated with the Nazis during World War II personally made harsh anti-Jewish legislation even tougher, a leading Nazi hunter said on Sunday, citing a newly unveiled document.