Welcome. We are delighted you are here. Briefly, the center is a relatively new project and our mission is to bring to bear on a a host of contemporary issues. We host Public Programs like these. We have a blog where historians write for us about contemporary hit issues from a historical specter. We are in the midst of a collaboration with the Philadelphia Inquirer to have more historical scholarship in local journalism. We have a number of things here in kansas and out in the community. If your joining us for the first time, welcome. We are delighted you are here and hope you stay connected to us. We have other programs and events for you to attend. We hope this is the beginning of a long relationship with the Lepage Center and villanova university. For those of you tune in on cspan or on our livestream, i should let you know this is the fourth in a series we have done this year on the subject of rigid revisionist history. You may be thinking, is revisionist history a contemporary issue to be addressed . If you look in popular culture, you will find references to revisionist history in many places. How many of you happen following the Senate Impeachment trial, show of hands . You may have heard the president s defense team invoked revision of history two days ago during the trial and cited the New York Times 6019 project as the revisionist history project, something we can we talked about. Our purpose this year has been to explore and challenge the questions about the revision and to eliminate that scholarship and historical scholarship depends on that revision at the empirical start of the process. With tonights subject, the holocaust, the word revision can often have more nefarious and insidious affiliations. For that reason, i want to start tonights event with a joint prepared statement created by the Lepage Center and i would like to read it in its entirety, if you would allow me to. This years series of roundtable discussions seeks to to explore challenging historical topics and to introduce a public audience to the ways revision necessarily in ones all of historical scholarship. We are aware that in connection with the evenings topic, the term, revisionism, has suggested a willingness to downplay or to deny nazi germanys mid20 century efforts to exterminate your jewish population. We reject any effort to deny the well documented history of that. To start off on a clear foundation, we believe it is important to reiterate that any honest intellectual discussion of the scholarship on the holocaust must start by analogy with basic historical fact of the holocaust. That said, i want to put this up for a moment because we have been disport exploring through a series of conversations why revision is important and what the revision we envision relies on. Historical scholarship necessitates looking at new sources, it necessitates new examinations, it necessitates expanding the interpretations, bringing in a diversity of perspectives, and it is an evolving process. Understanding these complex historical events is continually evolving and being enriched by new scholars and scholarship. This is the premise upon which our conversation rests tonight. Our holocaust scholarship is being continually revised, new ideas, new sources, new interpretations, and new scholars. Throughout these events and tonight, you will meet scholars who have fresh perspectives, have done interesting things and research, and helped us figure out what happens and why it matters for today. Let me introduce you to the scholars on our panel who will be here for tonights conversation. I will manipulate back to this slide. You may have seen in the promotion for this event that Tina Grossman in new york city was scheduled to join us. Unfortunately, she is not able to be with us this evening but she sends her regards and regrets. Let me first introduce jennifer rich next to me, the executive director of the row and center for the study of holocaust, genocide, and human rights and assistant professor of sociology. We have a tradition not to create handouts that invariably going to the trash or the recycle them. Recycle bin. Your phone still on silent, we encourage you to look at more Information Online about speakers. Seated next to her is devon pendas. He is the professor of history at boston college. His research is focused on were crime trial at the world word to come particular west germany, the west Germany Holocaust trial. Seated next to him is our faculty director and assistant director of european history, paul steege, who is focused on history of everyday life. He has done scholarship on germany, berlin, and we will begin the evening by learning more about our scholars and where they come from on the topic and from there, we will dive into the conversation. For now, i will go back to jennifer. Allow me to welcome you to the Lepage Center. The easiest way to get into the conversation is for you to tell us a little about the center you direct and a little about your research in your area of study. Hi, everybody. I am the executive director for the study of holocaust studies and human rights. It is a bit of a mouthful. We are in glassboro, new jersey. We look at, certainly, the holocaust, also other genocides. One question we are asked most often is so what. What can we do about it now, so we made this decision this semester to switch our emphasis and push into human rights to answer the so what question that so many students have. My own research focuses on holocaust memory, what do the generations of those who survived the holocaust know, understand, and remember, and Holocaust Education. I was first an education professor and before that, elementary school. I had a strong indication of how this is remembered in communities. We like to say history is both what and how. You come from a sociology background. For those not familiar, what does sociology bring to this question . What is the how . It is looking at how people in communities active. What choices they had, what choices they made, what agency they took when they felt they did not have choices. The perspective of sociology is on the people and the choices and the communities formed throughout the holocaust and any other issue. If i may put you on the spot a little more, is there an example that you might be able to share off the top of your head from the research you have done or other work at the center, what is the example people might be able to put their minds around . One of the most common questions i get in the classes i teach is things like, why didnt people leave . If this what if this is what was going to happen, why did people not leave when they had the chance . I hear stories of families on the holocaust who started to leave their hometown and made the choice to go back. With things like, the devil you know is always better than the devil you do not. That would be one example of agency that people had and their understandings at the time and reinforcement between community members. One family who talk to another family who who you heard a rumor, and that is how decisions were made when they did not know what was ahead of them. Another example of community, thinking of my own research, children, would be the communities formed, that would be another example. Thank you. We will get much more into that as the conversation unfolds. Devin, i will put you on the spot next. We are delighted to have you here. Welcome to the Lepage Center. Thank you for inviting me here. It is my first time in villanova. Im excited to speak to all of you. The easiest way to explain my agenda is i started with the story of the aftermath of the holocaust. Sort of the question of, this horrible thing happened. Now what do we do . How do we respond to this awful event . Much of that focus has been on regal attempts at redress for this criminal trial in particular. I have done a little work on reparations as well, trying to look at this question of how do societies, mainly germany, but also, to some lesser extent, places like the United States where they are not privy trader nations, how they use the law and criminal justice to respond to this. I have expanded questions around general strategies i do a lot of history of International Law as well. I have done a lot of work on the history of the holocaust, what historians have said about the holocaust, how our interpretations and understandings of the holocaust have evolved not just since 1945, because jewish individuals while it was ongoing. Since the time of the holocaust itself, how our interpretations changed. I have done a fair amount of work on that as well. Is this something with collaboration, what are some disciplinary intersections . Every other year, i teach a course for judging in the state of florida of all places. So i teach a course. It is interesting to hear the kinds of things judges bring to the table. The way they are different than what historians would ask. What choices did people make, why did they make those choices. Whether people are following the rule. One exercise we do that is fascinating and slightly disturbing is i distribute briefcase studies of criminal cases for mixedrace sexual relations during the 1930s in germany. I asked them and i present the laws and how would you respond to this and how this was actually handled in a court of law. For the most part, the judges, by the law. You consider how unjust the law is. On the other hand would you want a world in which judges willynilly said i think that is unjust and i will not follow it . How far down the rabbit hole can you go . It gives you really serious and ethical quandaries. Before you refused to force them to resign from the bench. Do you stay on and try and make things less bad . Fascinating. We will get more into that as we go on this evening. Factory director of the Lepage Center, paul, same question to you. How do you enter this conversation . I would describe myself as an historian of everyday life. In terms of thinking about everyday life, it is sometimes hard to imagine ordinary life for everyday life as something that is at all pertinent to talk about, this her endlessly violent criminal act at the middle of the 20th century. I think in fact, looking at violence and the ways people make sense of and tell stories about and participate in the act of violence. Tremendous violence dont depend on monsters or dont tend on depend on people who are in extraordinary situations. So many people found it so possible to integrate this kind of violence into ordinary lives. You actually teach a class on nazi germany here at villanova. Maybe you can talk about that and how you deal with that in the classroom with students and bring up these types of questions with students and people study in the holocaust. My starting point is very much thinking about the humanity of the people with history, by taking seriously their humanity, that is both victims and perpetrators, the germans, jewish germans, polls, people from all over europe, americans, and think about the ways in which they were in some ways familiar with us. They are not going to be an exotic other that we look at and say, how can we imagine any connection to that, but what is so unsettling is the ways in which their story and experiences make a lot of sense. I always think the best history is not a history that draws a line under the past and tells us what to know, but rather, the history that unsettles the ground beneath our feet and forces us to ask questions about ourselves. Matt is very much the ways in which i try to keep those questions and unsettled our complacency even if we are comfortably and villanova in the first part of the 20th century. Thank you. I hope that gives you a window into the scholarship we havent expertise we have. To in case people want to participate in cyberspace. Ive done a little polling of the audience. Now and throughout the conversation. For those of us in the room, how many of you are actively aware there is continual new scholarship on the holocaust . How many of you think, i thought we knew everything we needed to know about this. I want to start with you and bring it back to the question of the revisions of the scholarship. Everyone here seems to assume already the scholarship on the holocaust continues to be revised and expanded. Can you give the history of the history . Very long time ago. Much of the postwar time period, there were two friends with a holocaust biography. One with a history of jews as an element of jewish history, how did jews respond to the holocaust, how did they resist, what kinds of strategies for survival, how did they die, how did they make sense of their loved ones, and they treated this like the aspect of a longer history. Sometimes, it could remain much more focused and interested in jewish identity. Then there was a history of perpetrators and of german history. Still a story within the history of modern germany, where are the origin points for germany, antisemitism, nazism all the way back to martin luther, with 1918 and world war i, what are the decisionmaking purposes to exterminate jews, these kinds of questions. These unconnected historiography is, there were times when we struggled with great hostility between the groups. A lot of german historians were mistrustful of survival testimony survivor testimony that they were overly biased. A lot of jewish historians were distrustful of german historians, thinking they were germans. In some cases, it turns out in the 1960s, it later turned out spent time at the ss end of the war for example. I would say really only in the 2000s, beginning with the work of the really important historian, he started to get what he termed integrated histories into the holocaust. They tried to bring together the history of the jewish experience of murder and survival and the perpetrator side of the story, that led to this. These were not separate events by definition. The jews were not need not merely reacting to initiatives. There was an interaction on there that tried to bring these not just in the dialogue but of the same story, there has been an Important Development to overcome the bifurcation. The other thing that has happened and may be more controversial, has been the history of the holocaust, but history of genocide the history of genocide. That this is an example of a broader and more general phenomenon in the way that world war ii as an example of the history of war. Yet there are distinctive elements of a specific war that is different from world war i and the civil war, but it is recognizable as a war. The holocaust as genocide, we have recognizable features with other instances in the history of the world that we can learn from, precisely to highlight the differences, which are distinct from instances of genocide, but also to recognize the commonality. In some cases, some historians have argued it is kind of an ongoing genocidal profit of the multinational european empires, starting in the late 19th century with the Ottoman Empire and the balkans, and stretching into the early 1950s with germans from europe that is kind of a process of what one historian called the unbelieving of europe, so it is a particularly rabid of phenomenon. That has gotten some pushback from people who would argue the holocaust is if not radically unique, certainly distinct from other processes of ethnic cleansing in the balkans, for instance. I think there should be a five minute youtube video. That was fantastic. Well done. You have got genocide and human rights at the name of your center. You seem to be in the later stages of development, where other questions of rights are integrated into what you do. Talk a little about how that came about and how you see the holocaust within these other dynamics. Sure. Between us in this room and anyone watching at home, we have had a huge debate about the name of our center. And whether it is repetitive to say study of the holocaust genocide and human rights. Whether holocaust and genocide are repetitive. Fundamentally, we have landed on the perspective of saying, at least for now, though we expect conversations to go on for months, years, decades, the holocaust is one of many and unique in its own way. Because Holocaust Education scholars talk about learning from the holocaust in learning about the holocaust, learning about the holocaust test do with learning facts. What happened when to whom and where. Learning these nebulous lessons we want to attach to Holocaust Education, we want students to stick up for the underdog, to question laws when they are just or unjust. There are perhaps generalities to a we can learn from the holocaust as opposed to about the holocaust. Human rights, when we think about human rights violations, in the holocaust and every other genocide and atrocities and in everyday life, we think about clean water water or voting suppression, human rights is meant to give us a broader umbrella to think about these things. One thing we talked about was, how much of the debates between scholars and historian debates ever reach out to the general public and should they . I wonder with your perspective what you think about some of the debates that happen within scholarship circles and how it manifests itself. I love that we have somebody people in the audience tonight, it speaks to the way scholars talk about this. It is of interest. Maybe the answer i would suggest is that the questions drive a lot of these conversations. Rather than thinking about scholarship as a way of formulating answers, think about scholarship as a way of posing new kinds of questions. Even in terms of, i suspect not all of you were maybe many of you have heard about the controversy of the 1990s. But this is about historians who uses similar set of archival data and come to very different conclusions about what it means. There was a big debate covered on cspan at the holocausts cm and overflow crowd and part of the question was about how you look at these people and perpetrators and what you call them. Ordinary men . Ordinary germans . Is there something particularly about their germaness that led them to be willing to participate in in mass murder, or is there something more generally ordinary about them that a variety of different factors appear pressure and ideology in the sense that they need to live up to the standards of other men in their units, this is something a lot of historians got very exercised about and a lot of inkless spilled about it. I think it has shaped the field in terms of the question of paying more attention not just to extermination camps like auschwitz, but to Pay Attention to police units engaged in the countrysi