How could young Jews imagine falling in love and building a family in post-Holocaust Germany? In this talk, Christian Bailey explores Jewish love relationships across the turbulent 100 years from German unification to the first decades after the Holocaust. Whereas Jewish suitors before 1933 might imagine a good marriage as a springboard for success in German society, those who survived the Shoah usually looked forward to a future anywhere but in Germany. Yet some Jews decided to settle in the country of the perpetrators. In contrast to earlier generations who may have thought their search for a loving family life made them typically German, Holocaust survivors primarily valued familial love as a sign of Jewish endurance in the face of German hostility.
Professor Bailey earned his Ph.D. in history from Yale University and is currently an assistant professor of history and a contributing member of the gender studies faculty at Purchase College SUNY. He is the author of “Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950” (2013) and the recently published “German Jews in Love” (Stanford University Press, 2022).
Registration is open and required.
About the Holocaust Living History Workshop
This event is a part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) series, an education and outreach program sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies program. It aims to preserve the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by offering public events involving witnesses, descendants and scholars and through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Past HLHW workshops are now part of the Library’s digital collections and can be accessed online here.
Image Credit: Purchase College
Sponsor: Thurgood Marshall College, UC San Diego
Contact:
Susanne Hillman
shillman@ucsd.edu
Registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/love-in-the-shadow-of-genocide-featuring-christian-bailey-tickets-513515768487