*Mandatory Course

The course will examine the development and implementation of the “Final Solution” and various historical theories regarding the Nazis’ decision-making process through reading and analysis of historical literature and some of the key documents from the period. Did Hitler and the Nazi leadership plan to murder the Jews all along, or did they reach this decision at a late date? How and based on what factors were the decision reached? What were the roles of Occupied and Axis societies? What did Jews perceive? The examination will be thematic, geographical, and chronological, and will raise questions regarding the interconnections between different periods, places, and factors that affected policymaking and responses.

The examination will be thematic, geographical, and chronological, and will raise questions regarding the interconnections between different periods, places, and factors that affected policy-making and responses.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus

*Mandatory Course

This course will offer an in-depth look at World War II and how it played out in Europe. It will combine military history with political and social aspects of the war. The course seeks to offer a comprehensive picture of a conflict that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people. It will do so by analyzing different perceptions, levels, and layers of the conflict. The course will also touch upon questions of remembrance, justice, and portrayals in popular culture. Furthermore, by including recently discovered footage and other sources from the time, it is hoped that this course will challenge existing trends that put this conflict into a very distant and removed past. This course will open up important perspectives on and the background of the Holocaust.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus

The aim of this concentrated course is to introduce the field of Holocaust history through a variety of angles: (a) its course of development over the decades as a result of a variety of factors - political interests and pressures, judicial and restitution procedures, archival accessibility, scholarly methodologies, media representations, coping strategies of survivors and defense strategies of perpetrators, and more; (b) major controversies that dominate(d) the field; (c) coping with the challenge of conceptualization; (d) the Holocaust historian's workshop: from raw documents to the shaping of historical interpretation: analyzing a selection of key historical documents and their interpretations by scholars.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus

*Mandatory Course

*Online Course

In 1939, there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland or about 10% of the total population of the Polish Republic. Polish Jews formed the largest Jewish community in Europe. In 1945, six years later, no more than 50,000 Jews remained alive in Poland. Almost 98.5% of Polish Jewry (excluding the 300.000 who fled the Germans and survived in the Soviet Union) have perished in the Holocaust. A nation rich in history, with its own traditions and language ceased to exist. On September 1st, 1939, the German forces invaded Poland and – before the end of the month– completed the conquest of the country. The course will focus on the initial German policies directed against the Jews and, at the same time, it shall follow the reactions of the Jewish community in the face of new existential threats. The lectures will shed light on the creation of the ghettos, on the strategy of the Jewish leadership and the plight of the Jewish masses.The course will explore the growing German terror and the implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”- as Germans referred to the policies of mass extermination. The students will become familiar with the planning and the execution of the so-called “Aktion Reinhard”, as well as with the survival strategies pursued later by the Jews who avoided the 1942-43 deportations to the extermination camps. While learning about German perpetrators and Jewish victims, the students will also explore the attitudes of Polish society and the Polish Catholic Church to the persecuted Jews. Although the course is geographically centered on Poland, it will place the discussed events in a broader, European, context.

2024 Course Syllabus

The course explores issues of Jewish observance and religion in relation to the Holocaust from different perspectives:

• The impact of Nazi Rule on Jewish religious practice and community
• The challenges and theological shifts during the Holocaust period
• The post war era and the religious response to the Holocaust
• The Christian world and the Holocaust

2024 Course Syllabus

This course explores the specifics of the Holocaust in Western Europe with a particular focus on France.  The course examines the events of the Holocaust as they unfolded in France between 1940-1944, in course of World War II. The study of France will highlight the complex relationship between the German occupying forces and the French State, the complex attitude of the Vichy government towards the French Jewry, the relations between Jews of foreign nationality who had found refuge in France in the interwar period, and the long standing French Jewish communities. The specificities of the Holocaust in other Western countries including Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy will serve us as a point of comparison, with a focus on the number of victims and rescue attempts, as well as mechanisms of persecution.

In addition to use of central studies written on different aspects of the Holocaust in Western Europe, in the course we will also rely widely and utilize relevant firsthand accounts and archival documentation, and we will engage with digital tools that connect with the course topics.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus

*Online Course

In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, East European Jewry constituted the most important and influential Jewish community in the world. As a result of half a century of mass migration to the West, up to 90% of world Jewry either lived in Eastern Europe or were children of east European immigrants. Although scholarship and popular memory typically equate Eastern Europe with the Russian Empire, in fact Jews in the eastern Austrian empire – in Galicia and Bukowina – numbered one million souls by the Holocaust, plus hundreds of thousands of emigres throughout the world. Moreover, despite the popular image of the cunning, coarse, fanatical “Galitsyaners,” Galicia actually served as a center of haskalah(Jewish Enlightenment), rabbinic scholarship and a vital and innovative Hasidic movement, and later produced countless Zionist and socialist leaders as well as a cadre of literary and academic stars including most prewar Polish-Jewish historians and, most famously, the noble prize laureate S.Y. Agnon.

This course surveys the establishment, flourishing and destruction of this once vital community by examining its social, economic, political, religious and cultural history from the eighteenth century – the time of the province's creation – to the Holocaust and its aftermath. While we focus on Galicia, we will regularly place Galicia in its broader East European context, particularly in the final three lectures covering the period after the demise of Galicia as a legal province at the end of the First World War.

2024-2025 Course Syllabus

The Holocaust in the Baltic States obliterated a vibrant and diverse Jewish community that had existed for centuries. On the eve of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, approximately 300,000 Jews lived within the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. By the end of 1944, only a few thousand had survived the war. While the destruction of the Jews in the Baltics was top-down Nazi policy, the process of persecution and mass murder was accompanied by widespread local collaboration, thus adding another layer of horror and complexity to the events. Through reading and analyzing key historical documents alongside individual voices of survivors, perpetrators, and rescuers, this course aims to provide a historical and geographic context of the life and death of the Jewish communities in the Baltic States. By examining macro and micro-historical perspectives the course will shed light on the various German forces and local groups that took part in the implementation of the Final Solution in this region and explore the different processes that transformed inter-ethnic relations from neighborly to murderous, thus gain a better understanding of history often overlooked. While the focus on the Baltic States will be thematic, geographical, and chronological, the course will also place the region in its broader East European context.

2024 Course Syllabus

This seminar will focus on the women and men behind the symbol of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as a major test case of Jewish armed resistance in the ghettos in Poland. Its leading question will be: What were the driving forces behind the uprising? In the historical aspect, we will study the social composition of rebels as a reflection of "Modern Jewish Politics." In the theoretical aspect, we will examine the uprising as a manifestation of a distinct social formation, the "Jewish youth movement." In the methodological aspect, we will practice the reading of Holocaust memoirs, written from different perspectives, in terms of place, language, political affiliation and gender.

2025 Course Syllabus