30th annual Symposium on the Holocaust and Genocide

Efraim Zuroff

Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs. For four decades, he has played a major role in facilitating the prosecution of many Nazi war criminals all over the world. He is the author of four books (translated into 15 languages) and numerous articles on Holocaust-related issues and their impact on the Jewish world. A recipient of many honors, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

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9:00 am

Post-war and the Pursuit of Nazi War Crimes

Jeff Benvenuto

Jeff Benvenuto (PhD, Rutgers University) is an Adjunct Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Gratz College. He is a contributing co-editor of Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Duke University Press, 2014) and has published in Journal of Genocide Research and Genocide Studies and Prevention. Currently he is co-authoring a book on critical genocide studies and prevention, as well as revisiting his dissertation work on human rights, settler colonialism, and the normalcy of assimilation.

Zoom

10:30 am

Indigenous Genocide

Honourable Bob Rae

Mr. Rae is the Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the United Nations in New York. Before, he was elected to federal and provincial parliaments, served as interim leader of the liberal party of Canada and premier of Ontario. He also taught Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and practiced law, specialized in indigenous law and constitutional issues. In 2017, Mr. Rae was appointed as Canada’s Special Envoy to Myanmar to address the crisis in the country and later was named Canada’s Special Envoy on Humanitarian and Refugee issues.

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2:00 pm

The Plight of the Uyghur People

Madeline Vadkerty

Madeline Vadkerty is a Samuel P.Mandell Fellow in the doctoral program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Gratz College (USA). Madeline is from the US, and she lives in Bratislava, Slovakia where she conducts Holocaust research. Her book, Slovutny pan prezident: Listy Jozefovi Tisovi (Your Honor, Mr. President: Letters to Jozef Tiso) (Absynt, 2020) received the "Book of the Year" Award from Panta Rhei and she received a book prize from the Association of Independent Slovak Writers in 2021. She is the author of numerous articles about the Holocaust in Slovakia and regularly makes presentations for the public and Slovak

schools. Madeline worked at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and for a non-profit providing assistance to survivors of torture from more than 80 countries. She currently works at the Holocaust Documentation Center in Bratislava. Madeline has a degree in French and Russian from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Zoom

9:00 am

The Holocaust in Slovakia: Letters to President Jozef Tiso 1939 - 1944

Haris Rafiq

Haras Rafiq is the interim Managing Director of Institute for Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and a trustee of the UK Charity Muslims Against Antisemitism. Haras has been a Counter-Extremism and Counter Terrorism expert since 2004. Furthermore, Haras has served as CEO for 7 years at Quilliam International (the world’s first counter Islamism think tank) and as an Executive Board Member. In addition to this, Haras has been a trustee of the UK and French Government Securities Think Tank – The Franco British Council. He was also until 2018 a member of the Advisory Group on Online Terrorist Propaganda at Europol’s European Counter- terrorism Centre (ECTC). Haras has testified at various Parliamentary hearings including All Party Parliamentary Groups (UK) and at Senate Committee Hearings (USA).

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11:00 am

The Triple Threat to our Democracies; How antisemitism is the Fuel

Maximilian Staudacher
Leonie Wolfram

The goal of the multimedia programm is to encourage people to think critically, discerning the difference between fact and fiction. The role of the Internet in disseminating information is contrasted with the media during the time of the Shoah.

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1:00 pm

Fact Fiction Propaganda

Patricia Chappine

Patty Chappine is an adjunct professor at Stockton University where she teaches courses in the Holocaust and Genocide studies and historical studies programs. She is also an adjunct in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Graduate program at Gratz College. She earned a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Stockton University. She also earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History and Culture from Drew University in Madison, NJ. Her research interests include Holocaust and Genocide studies, women’s history, New Jersey history, digital humanities, and civic activism. She is a Board Member At-Large of OHMAR (Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region).

Zoom

10:30 am

Women as Resistors in the Holocaust

Commemoration Service

Zoom and live in the Boardroom F216 (RSVP)

12:00 - 1:30 pm

Khatchig Mouradian

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies, New York University. Mouradian is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915- 1918, published in 2021. The book has received the Syrian Studies Association “Honourable Mention 2021.” In 2020, Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University.

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2:30 pm

The Long Shadow of the Armenian Genocide

Michael Berenbaum

Michael is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and the development of historical films. He served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation and was the conceptual developer on several other Museums and Memorials. He has previously taught at many distinguished universities. In addition, he was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Genocide. Michael is the author and editor of twenty-two books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. Moreover, he served as producer, writer, and historian for dozens of documentaries and films. His work on films was recognized with Academy Awards, an Emmy Award and the Cable Ace Award. He is also a consultant and interviewee on several broadcasts and has been featured on television many times.

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10:00 am

The Big Lie: Then and Now! What We can Learn and What We Should Fear of Nazi German Propaganda

Terry Glavin

Author, journalist. Ottawa Citizen and National Post columnist. Contributing editor, Maclean's magazine. Senior Fellow, Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. Author of several books, including Come From The Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan and recipient of several literary and journalism awards. Recent assignments: Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Geneva, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

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12:00 pm

Afghanistan and the Origins of Talibanism

Robert Krell

Robert Krell was born in The Netherlands and survived the Holocaust in hiding. The family moved to Canada in 1951. He is Emeritus, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. During his career he became involved in treatment issues concerning Holocaust survivors and their children as well as Dutch prisoners of Japanese concentration camps. Dr. Krell is the founder of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and has been involved in Holocaust education and audiovisual documentation since the mid 1970's. His most recent book published book was a memoir titled "Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust survivor”. Professor Krell is both a psychiatrist and teacher. He has been awarded the Order of Canada.

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2:00 pm

Making Meaningless Meaningful

Matthias Becker

Matthias is a linguist, with a focus on pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse and media studies, research on prejudice and nationalism, as well as on the Internet/social media studies. He is a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technische Universität in Berlin. Furthermore, he is affiliated to CENTRIC (Sheffield Hallam University) and to the Vidal Sassoon Center at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Currently he is leading a project entitled “Decoding Antisemitism: An AI-driven Study on Hate Speech and Imagery Online.” Matthias is on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.

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10:00 pm

Understanding Online Antisemitism: New Challenges Require New Approaches

John Packer

John Packer is Neuberger-Jesin Professor of International Conflict Resolution in the Faculty of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. He previously taught at the Fletcher School (Tufts University, USA) and the University of Essex (UK), held Fellowships at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, and has lectured at academic and professional institutions around the world. Over his 30-year career, he was an inter-governmental official for 20 years (UNHCR, ILO, OHCHR, UNDPA, OSCE) and has advised numerous governments, communities and other actors in over fifty countries. As a UN staff member in the early 1990s, he investigated serious violations of human rights in Iraq, Afghanistan and Burma/Myanmar. From 1995 to 2004, he was Senior Legal Adviser then the first Director in the Office of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities advising in conflict across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (including mediating Ukraine-Russia relations). In 2012-2014, he was the Constitutions and Process Design Expert on the UN’s Standby Team of Mediation Experts. The focus of his research and practice is at the inter-section of human rights (including minority rights) and security, notably conflict prevention and quiet diplomacy, international mediation, transitional arrangements, constitutional and legal reform, and institutional developments at domestic and multilateral levels.

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12:00 pm

Living Together in the Era of Extreme Nationalism: The Ukraine-Russia Conflict

Edward Westermann

Edward B. Westermann received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He has published extensively in the areas of German military history and the Holocaust. He is the author of Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (2005) and Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (2016). He was a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin, a three-time German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellow, and a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at the USHMM. His most recent work, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany, appeared with Cornell University Press in association with the USHMM in March 2021.

Zoom

2:30 pm

Drunk on Genocide