Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar Lecture

A public lecture by Atina Grossmann (Professor of History, The Cooper Union)
2024-2025 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence

Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research with cooperation from the USC Shoah Foundation

As Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany traveled throughout the colonial and quasi-colonial Global South, they encountered highly diverse local populations and authorities. Always shadowed by the emerging European catastrophe, uprooted Jews were also precariously privileged as white Europeans in non-western, colonial, or semi-colonial societies. In this distinguished lecture, Professor Atina Grossmann shares exciting new work by herself and a transnational cohort of Holocaust scholars on the ambivalent, paradoxical, and varied experiences, emotions, and memories of Jews who found refuge from National Socialism and the Holocaust in India and Iran after 1933.

From wartime Nazi Berlin throughout the global diaspora, family correspondence and memorabilia of German Jews – as well as archival, literary, visual, and oral history sources – illuminate refugees’ everyday lives in the changing context of interwar fascination and contact with the “Orient,” the global war against fascism, anti-colonial independence movements, and gradual revelations about the destruction of the European world they had escaped.

This lecture will be followed by a lunch hosted by USC Shoah Foundation. Advanced RSVP for the lunch (via the registration form) is required. Space is limited.

Register Here

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Cooper Union in New York City. She is the author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton University Press, 2007, German 2012), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin und Teheran (Jena, 2012), and Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (Oxford University Press 1995). She has co-authored or co-edited five additional books.Read more about her here.