Jewish Refugees in the Middle East
Atina Grossmann teaches modern European and German history, and women's and gender studies at The Cooper Union in New York City. A graduate of the City College of New York (B.A) and Rutgers University (M.A, Ph.D), she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, German Marshall Fund, American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Berlin, as well as guest professorships at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
Her scholarly books include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995); Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (co-editor with Bartov and Nolan, 2002), and When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (co-editor with Renate Bridenthal and Marion Kaplan, 1984), and Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 (2007).
Her current research focuses on the WWII Jewish refugee experience in the Soviet Union, especially in Central Asia and on the relief and rescue efforts centered in Iran and India that worked to keep this small group of Jewish-Polish survivors alive. Her research on these "transnational" Jewish refugee stories" also explores the marginalization of this "Asiatic" Holocaust experience in both history and memory culture, its inscriptions and omissions in cultural memory during and after the war, as well as its potential role in the more recent and highly politicized "globalization” of Holocaust memory, in both the western and nonwestern world.
Professor Grossmann's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.
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(Text adapted from Cooper Union websites.)