"Impudent Jews" The Forgotten Individual Jewish Resistance in Hitler’s Germany - An online lecture by Pr. Wolf Gruner

Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still understood mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan activities. Based on a new approach and new sources, as police and court materials from various German cities and video testimonies of survivors, the talk will demonstrate, how Jewish women and men performed countless acts of resistance in Nazi Germany proper between 1933 and 1945: from destroying Nazi symbols and writing petitions to public protest and physical self-defense. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations and professions defied Nazi measures and protested in public obliterates the common view of passivity on the part of the persecuted. Thus, this research gives agency back to ordinary Jews in extraordinary circumstances. Their courageous acts still need to be incorporated into the general narrative of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in general.

Thursday, June 10, 2021 - 17:00 to 19:00 CEST Paris on Zoom

Wolf Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008 and is the Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014.  

He received his PhD in History in 1994 as well as his Habilitation in 2006 from the Technical University Berlin. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness at Webster University in St. Louis. He is the author of ten books on the Holocaust, among them “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims”, with Cambridge University Press (paperback 2008). He also published „Parias de la Patria“. El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890”, in Spanish with Plural Editores 2015. Gruner’s most recent book is the award winning The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses (Berghahn 2019/ The book was published in German 2016, in Czech 2019, and is forthcoming in Hebrew with Yad Vashem 2022). He coedited four books, including „Resisting Persecution. Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust” (Berghahn 2020), “ New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” (Purdue UP 2019), and “The Greater German Reich and the Jews. Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935-1945” (Berghahn 2015).  

Registrants will receive the information to join via email, a few hours prior to the lecture.

Please note that the lecture will take place at 5pm Central European Time.