Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies

Today we bid a fond farewell to Liam Wirsansky as he finished his project and headed for home in Florida. For some weeks this summer, Liam served as our Ted and Dale Rosengarten Fellow creating a complete descriptive finding aid for the entire Holocaust archive held at Addlestone Library Special Collections.

In the coming academic year we will use this aid to create a source book for students, researchers, visitors, and family members that will help them all use our collections to the fullest. Professor Gibbs will also use this new aid to create a local Holocaust research class focusing on student work with our collections.

Keep an eye out here to see how all of this comes together!

The College of Charleston Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program now has a blog! Here is a first story about what some of we have been up to this summer at the Zucker/Goldberg Center.

This was a great trip and a wonderful opportunity for South Carolina teachers. We can't thank our partners at the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust enough and look forward to doing something like this again soon.

Genocide and Civil Rights Education Along the Freedom Trail: The Holocaust in Context Teacher Study Tour | Campus Kibitz Genocide and Civil Rights Education Along the Freedom Trail: The Holocaust in Context Teacher Study Tour The Holocaust did not happen in a vacuum. As we know, it grew from wider forces of hate both inside Germany and across the globe. While those facts may be easy to state, the more difficult work i...

Congratulations to Ashley Walters as she takes over as the new director of the College of Charleston Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program!

We wish her the best and know she will be a great leader for our program!

A new piece in the Times of Israel on Professor Gibbs' new book.

For eight decades, the experiences of women who resisted the N***s at the death camp Treblinka were almost entirely erased from Holocaust memory.

But in a seminal book published earlier this month, historian Chad S.A. Gibbs demonstrates that female prisoners played a pivotal role in resistance at Treblinka, the German-built extermination center in occupied Poland where 925,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

In “Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance,” Gibbs zooms in on the “gendered geography” of Treblinka. He is especially interested in how groups of prisoners — including women — “carved out places of resistance” underneath the perpetrators’ noses.

Read more on The Times of Israel.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-treblinka-research-uncovers-forgotten-role-of-women-in-1943-death-camp-revolt/

Quick summer update!

After a longer trip for archival research and study abroad planning, Professor Gibbs is just back from Dearborn, MI where he attended the biannual meeting of the Consortium for Higher Education Centers for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies. A great group that facilitated some excellent conversations on the present and future of the work we do.

As director of the Zucker/Goldberg Center, Professor Gibbs serves on the Executive Committee of the Consortium.

Big news at the Zucker/Goldberg Center this week!

We can now share that Dr. Tamar Aizenberg will join us in the fall as the next Rose Mibab and Carl Goldberg Postdoctoral Fellow in Holocaust Studies. She will take over as the wonderful Dr. Hana Green heads to TAMU-San Antonio to take up her new position there as assistant professor of history.

Dr. Tamar Aizenberg is a scholar of modern Jewish history, Holocaust history and memory, and oral history. Her current work is an experiential history of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators—the third generation—in Austria, Germany, and the United States. She examines the development of these grandchildren as distinct groups, the ways their families narrate their histories, and how members of the third generation explore family history on their own terms. Tamar recently completed her PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, where she also co-taught an undergraduate course on the history of antisemitic stereotypes.

While we are very sad to see her go, we wish Hana all the best and and extend hearty welcome to Tamar!

Check out the latest review of "Survival at Treblinka" by Chad S.A. Gibbs:

"Slim and read­able, Sur­vival at Tre­blin­ka will inter­est schol­ars of the Holo­caust as well as laypeo­ple curi­ous to under­stand how hero­ism takes shape and takes flight in the most des­per­ate of circumstances."

https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/survival-at-treblinka-geography-gender-and-social-networks-in-jewish-resistance

Chad Gibbs, University of Wisconsin Press, Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies

This week, Professor Gibbs traveled to the University of Nevada-Reno to give a talk on his new book. We are incredibly thankful to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for sponsoring this event and to Professor James McSpadden for the invitation!