Wednesday, 23 September 2026
12:00 p.m. EDT
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European Jewish survivors created yizker bikher - memorial books - to honour their murdered loved ones and destroyed towns. These collaboratively-written volumes were one way for survivors to reclaim their lives and memories.
Often dismissed as nothing more than nostalgic, amateur histories, these yizker bikher, as author Jennifer Rich reveals, serve as vibrant sources that reanimate prewar Jewish life, offer unvarnished accounts of the Germans and their local collaborators, and memorialize the people, places, and ways of life destroyed by the Holocaust.
Please join Dr. Rich (Executive Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Rowan University) in a wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Simon Goldberg (scholar of Eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust and Postdoctoral Fellow in Public History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Together, they will explore these memorial books as a lens on the rich diversity of prewar Eastern European Jewish life, Jewish postwar experiences, and the ways that survivors wanted their lives and their communities to be remembered. The conversation will be chaired by Professor Deb¨®rah Dwork, Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, The Graduate Center¡ªCity University of New York.
This event is hosted by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, The Graduate Center¡ªCity University of New York, in association with CÄ¢¹½ÊÓƵY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences, The Graduate Center - City University of New York; the William T. Daly School of General Studies and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University; and the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme.