In the early 20th century, Budapest was the second-largest Jewish city in Europe, and Jewish artists and intellectuals played a major role in the city’s cosmopolitan cultural life. Among them was theater and cinema director and producer Béla Pásztor, whose career was marked by early success and later oppression. In a conversation with UC San Diego history professor Deborah Hertz, Béla’s son, Rafael Pastor, explores his family’s history before, during, and after the Nazi occupation of Hungary, including his parents’ emigration to Israel, where he was born.

In commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the deportations and annihilations of Hungarian Jews in 1944, which Béla survived in hiding, the conversation is preceded by a brief historical overview and survivor testimonies of this harrowing—and unforgettable—tragedy.

Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 40227]

What does it take to survive persecution and exile? The story of Greta Taussig and Rudy Gans offers answers to this tantalizing question. Born in Linz, Austria, Greta emigrated to London after the country’s incorporation into the Third Reich, eventually enduring the horrors of the Blitz. Rudy was able to make his way to Shanghai after imprisonment in the notorious Dachau concentration camp. Along their arduous journey, each experienced the life-saving kindness of courageous strangers. As part of the UC San Diego Holocaust Living History Workshop, their son, Bob Gans, shares their thought-provoking story, supplemented by a display of artifacts and original documents. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39008]

On December 19, 1980, Shlomo Lewin, the former chairman of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, and his partner Frida Poeschke were shot dead in their house in Erlangen. Instead of pursuing the leads that led to the right-wing extremist group Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, investigators concentrated on Lewin’s social environment for a long time. As part of UC San Diego's Holocaust Living History Workshop, German historian Uffa Jensen reconstructs the crime and its motivations, in the process unearthing a history of violence, trivialisation and repression that continues to this day. Jensen is a historian of modern history and serves as the deputy director at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38976]

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. In 2020, the archives were finally opened. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents, Brown University Professor Emeritus David Kertzer’s book “The Pope at War” paints a dramatic portrait of what the Pope did and did not do as war enveloped Rome and the continent, and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Kertzer's earlier book, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe,” won the Pulitzer Prize. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38975]

Between 1918 and 1921, Ukrainian peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution murdered over a 100,000 Jews. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. In his new book “In the Midst of Civilized Europe,” acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust.

Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of multiple prize-winning books, including “The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage” (2000), “Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire” (2009), and “In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine” (2013). Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 39078]

Among the most striking exhibits at the Auschwitz museum are undoubtedly the mountains of loot stolen from Jews murdered upon arrival. Shoes, suitcases, spectacles, and more fill entire rooms in the former barracks of the main camp. Surviving the Shoah when their owners did not, they constitute a potent proof of the Nazis’ abiding concern with material gain. In this talk, author and historian Peter Hayes traces the ways by which the German corporate world became deeply implicated in—and in many respects indispensable to—the Nazi regime’s persecution, exploitation, and murder of Europe’s Jews. He argues that these developments stemmed inexorably from decisions made and actions taken by the nation’s leading corporate executives in 1933, at the very outset of Nazi rule.

Hayes is author or editor of 13 books, including the best-selling “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” and “Why? Explaining the Holocaust,” which has been translated into several foreign languages including German, Slovak, Spanish, and Chinese. He is currently completing (with Stephan Lindner of Munich) “Profits and Persecution: German Big Business, the Nazi Economy, and the Holocaust.” Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38423]

Twentieth-century fascism was a political ideology encompassing totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany’s case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Historians of the Holocaust tend to reject the notion of fascism as a causal explanation for its origins. Conversely, scholars of fascism present the Shoah as a particular event that is not central to fascist historiography. In this lecture Federico Finchelstein examines the challenge the Holocaust presents to the transnational history of ideology and politics.

A leading contemporary authority on global fascism, Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College and Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at NSSR. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 38422]

How does the concept of space enhance our understanding of the Holocaust? In this talk, British historian Tim Cole tells the story of the Shoah through an exploration of landscapes victims moved—and were moved—through across Europe. His exploration of the “Holocaust landscapes” shines a powerful light on the geographic dimensions of the Shoah. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37452]

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. Renamed Israel by the Nazis, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. In exile, he fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus.

Marc David Baer discusses his new book “German, Jew, Muslim, Gay” in which he tells the story of a highly unconventional man and reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37451]

When the Second World War came to an end, Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, lay in ruins. Few contemporaries, if any, could have anticipated that 70 years later, Berlin would boast large diaspora communities of Palestinians and Israelis who have made a home among Germans.

In “The Moral Triangle,” Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and Germans in Berlin to explore the fraught relationship between the three groups in the context of official German policies, public discourse and the private sphere.

Atshan is author of “Queer Palestine: Empire of Critique.” Galor, an art historian and archaeologist, is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer of Judaic Studies at Brown University. Her publications include ”The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans” (co-authored with Hanswulf Bloedhorn) and ”Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology Between Science and Ideology.” Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37751]