Description:

The Holocaust Educational Foundation and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies present their Annual Fall Lecture, featuring Wolf Gruner (University of Southern California Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History; Director, USC Dornsife Center of Advanced Genocide Research)

Open to the Public | Reception to Follow

Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany

In this lecture, Wolf Gruner will speak about his latest publication, Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany. Drawing on twelve years of research in dozens of archives in Austria, Germany, Israel, and the United States, the book presented here tells the story of five Jewish people—a merchant, a homemaker, a real estate broker, and two teenagers—who bravely resisted persecution and defended themselves in Nazi Germany.

These stories have not been told until now, and each case is one of many, as Gruner shows by resurfacing dozens of similar accounts of Jewish refusal to accept persecution and violence in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1943, upending the notion of passive Jews and expanding the concept of resistance.

Each individual described represents a category of resistance defined by the author: written opposition, oral protest, contesting Nazi propaganda, defiance of anti-Jewish laws and measures, and self-defense against physical attacks. Many of these courageous acts resulted in the Jewish resisters, men and women, young and old, being prosecuted and put on trial, and often receiving harsh punishments, while some led to acquittal by courts and others to changes in Nazi policies. Taken together, these accounts reframe our understanding of German Jewish agency during the Holocaust.