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Conference on the Allied Responses to the Holocaust

27.02.2015

Twenty eminent teachers and scholars from the United States, Great Britain, Poland, Israel, and China will meet in conference in Jerusalem from March 16 to 19, 2015, to offer new information and insights about the Allied Powers’ responses to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, or Shoah, has given rise to prolific academic studies and has inspired countless stories, novels, and films. Scholars have compiled mountains of data, explored multiple points of view on the depth and depravity of the Final Solution, and offered stories of the plights and heroism of Jewish victims, including their executions in the death camps and, on occasion, their miraculous survivals. The victorious Allies, on the other hand, have generally been portrayed as conquering heroes who were surprised, shocked, and horrified by what they found when they liberated the Jews remaining in the camps in 1945. Beginning in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Arthur Morse, Henry Feingold, and others questioned this portrayal. In 1984, David Wyman published a landmark study entitled: The Abandonment of the Jews – America and the Holocaust, a work that received numerous awards and made the New York Times Bestseller’s List. These works raised important and controversial new questions about the Holocaust including: What did the Allies know about the Holocaust as it unfolded? Were they somehow complicit in, or at least secondarily responsible for, the great catastrophe?

The principal speakers for the conference are listed on our Presenters page. They include established experts as well as fresh talent. Their approaches encompass a variety of academic fields including history, politics, law, and social thought. Their study has aspired to leave no stone unturned and no myth unexploded in this controversial field. Through their efforts, they will aim to stimulate further study and public, as well as academic, discussion of the wartime victors’ complex motivations and their actions in relation to one of the most profound tragedies in human history.

The Conference leaders include Alexander Groth, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of California –Davis, Tony J. Tanke, a California attorney and Senior Fellow and Lecturer at the Santa Clara University Law School, and Dr. Lawrence Weinbaum, Chief Editor of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs.

The Conference will be held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. Dr. Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Center in Washington D.C. will lead the proceedings with a keynote address on Monday evening, March 16, 2015, followed by three days of papers, presentations, and panel discussions among the distinguished speakers. Scholars and members of the public are invited to attend all or part of the conference. Admission is free and registration is online.

For more information see the webpage.