Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz
The 2018 Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture
Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, Brown University, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, will discuss his acclaimed new book.
Paul Holdengräber, Director of Public Programs, New York Public Library, and master interviewer, will join Dr. Bartov in conversation.
Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews coexisted in Buczacz for 400 years. Then, during WWII, the town descended into intergroup violence and ethnic cleansing. Why? Anatomy of a Genocide profoundly changes our understanding of the social dynamics of mass killing and the nature of the Holocaust. It is also a warning of how it could happen again, in our own towns and cities—much more easily than we might think.
About the Speakers
Omer Bartov, a leading historian of the Holocaust, is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, and Professor of German Studies, at Brown University. After earning his doctorate in history from Oxford University, Bartov’s early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his Germany’s War and the Holocaust and other works. His The “Jew” in Cinema examined the recycling of anti-Semitic stereotypes in film. Based on thousands of documents rarely seen until now, as well as hundreds of first-person testimonies by victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and rescuers, his new book, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, was published by Simon and Schuster in January 2018.
Paul Holdengräber, self-described as a curator of public curiosity, is director of public programs at the New York Public Library and the founder and director of LIVE from the NYPL, where over the past decade he has interviewed and hosted everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Carlo Ginzburg to Claude Lanzmann, Christian Boltanski to Saul Friedlander, Maira Kalman to Art Spiegelman, Margaret Atwood to Christopher Hitchens, Werner Herzog to Etgar Keret, Gunter Grass to Norman Mailer, David Grossman to Nicole Krauss, Elizabeth Gilbert to Mike Tyson. He received his doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University.
About the Rudin Lecture
The Jack and Lewis Rudin Lectures provide the opportunity for eminent academics, religious leaders, intellectuals, and public figures to discuss topics of interest with the JTS community and the public at large.
