[HLS Keynote] Coexistence and Violence: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians on Poland’s Eastern Borderlands (9/4/18)

Posted by maplesgw on Thursday, August 30, 2018 in 2018, Events.

Holocaust Lecture Series Keynote: “Coexistence and Violence: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians on Poland’s Eastern Borderlands “

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 at 7:00 PM
Flynn Auditorium, Vanderbilt Law School

This lecture will discuss the triangular relationship between Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia, with a particular emphasis on the town of Buczacz, between the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth century and the aftermath of World War II. These three groups had lived side-by-side for four centuries under Polish and Austrian rule. But this mostly peaceful existence unraveled under the impact of foreign invasions and increasingly violent nationalist rhetoric, eventually leading to ethnic cleansing and violence. The lecture will examine the links between external and domestic factors in the transformation of a community of coexistence into one of utter devastation.

Dr. Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History
and a Professor of German Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Omer Bartov’s early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, and Hitler’s Army. He then turned to the links between total war and genocide, discussed in his books Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany’s War and the Holocaust. Bartov’s interest in representation also led to his study, The “Jew” in Cinema, which examines the recycling of antisemitic stereotypes in film. His last monograph, Erased, investigates interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. As a framework for this research, he led a multi-year collaborative project at the Watson Institute, culminating in the co-edited volume, Shatterzone of Empires. Bartov’s new book, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2018.