Description:

with Marc David Baer, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science interviewed by Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What compels Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey? Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.

Marc David Baer (BA, History, Northwestern University; PhD, History, University of Chicago) is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford, 2008); The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, 2010); At Meydanı'nda Ölüm: 17. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Toplumsal Cinsiyet, Hoşgörü ve İhtida (Death on the Hippodrome: Gender, Tolerance, and Conversion in 17th century Istanbul) (Koç, 2016); Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (Indiana, 2020); and German, Jewish, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (Columbia, 2020). The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs is forthcoming in October 2021.

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (B.A. Bogazici University (Istanbul), 2002; Ph.D. New York University, 2010) is McMillan-Stewart Associate

Professor of History at MIT and is a historian of the modern Middle East and an affiliate of the Women and Gender Studies Program as well as the Center for International Studies. She specializes on Turkish and Armenian lands in the 19th and 20th centuries. Publications include a co- edited volume in Turkish titled Bir Adalet Feryadı, Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar (1862-1933) [A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862-1933)] (Aras, 2006); and the monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Beloning in Post-Genocide Turkey, (Stanford University Press, 2016). Current collaborations: with Dr. Melissa Bilal on a critical anthology of the history of Western Armenian feminism, “Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology”; and with Dr. Kent Schull (Binghamton, SUNY) on an edited volume on the entangled histories of Armenians in the 19th century Ottoman Empire.

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