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Mark Celinscak and Mehnaz Afridi, eds., "Global Approaches to the Holocaust: Memory, History and Representation" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)
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Head to blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a free professional measure. Blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast. Please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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D
Hi and welcome to New Books and Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Kellen McFall from Newman University and I'm a host on the channel. And today I'm thrilled to be talking with Mark Sellensak and Mahnaz Afridi, co editors of the outstanding new book Global Approaches to the Memory, History and Representation, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Mark Manaz, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us on new books and genocide studies.
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B
Thank you so much for having us, Kelly. I'm very excited about this.
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C
Thank you, Kelly.
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D
So I always want to start by giving the audience a chance to get to know our guests. And so I'll start with Mark. If you could just introduce yourself and say how you became an academic and why you became interested enough in the Holocaust and mass violence to spend a life thinking about it.
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C
Thank you for that. I am the Lewis and Francis Blomkin professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I'm in the Department of History there. I'm also the executive director of the Sam and Francis Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the university. So my interest in mass violence and in the Holocaust really comes from my background in military history. So in my master's and then later in my PhD studies, I really became interested in exploring how soldiers understand their experiences in war. And I'm a cultural historian, so I lean very heavily towards art, literature, poetry, things of that nature. And so I'm very interested in how soldiers conceptualize the experience of war through artistic mediums. So think war artists, war photographers, war poets, things like that. By the time I got to York University, where I did my PhD, um, I began taking courses not only in the Second World War, the First World War, but also on the Holocaust. And I, I, I had this like, sort of long standing interest in, in war studies and this kind of burgeoning interest in, in Holocaust studies. And, and it just so happened I, I took a course called the Limits of Representation about the Holocaust, about the Holocaust literature. And I just became utterly fascinated with it. And I found, I found a lot of parallels. This struggle, Traumatic event at times, right? War, and also in terms of the Holocaust. And so as I move forward in my postdoc and my PhD studies, excuse me, I really made a decision to sort of bring these two areas of study together. My long standing interest in war studies and my burgeoning interest in Holocaust studies. And the most obvious topic was the liberation of Nazi camps. So how did, in my, in my case, in the case of my first two books, how did Allied soldiers respond to the liberation of Nazi camps when they encountered these terrible crimes? How do you turn that situation into a work of art? What do you write home? How do you communicate? What, what words, what language, what metaphors do you use? And so that's sort of my entry point into Holocaust studies. This goes all the way back to, you know, early 2000s, when I was doing my PhD studies at York University. So that was really sort of how I began my career in terms of studying the Holocaust, studying mass violence.
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D
Excellent. Thank you, Manaz.
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B
Yeah, it's so nice to hear Mark talk. I mean, although we're friends and colleagues, you always learn more things about each other, especially during these wonderful dialogues and conversations. So mine, I'm going to give you three different ways of how I got here. One is childhood. I was raised all over basically the world and had many, many friends from different backgrounds and fates. And religion is kind of how I come to it. I'm in religious studies. I have a PhD in religious studies, but I was always very interested in the relationship between especially Jews, Muslims and Christians, and then grew into really Jewish Muslim relations. So that's one thing. And then when I was an undergraduate, I was given a special kind of TA ship, which they don't normally do because I had all these credits. And so I TA'd for Dr. Alan Berger, Holocaust scholar, who just blew my mind in terms of the literature. And I started to take over the course and said, wow. So that was like my. I mean, we had Holocaust studies in Europe where I was raised, basically, but it wasn't as thorough as what I got in Dr. Berger's class. And then he just asked me, do you want to go to Israel? I'm like, okay. So I went to Israel. And so, you know, basically that was kind of shaping how I thought about the Holocaust or genocide studies as well. And then, you know, maybe as sad, but maybe something constructive happened where I felt there was a lot of anti Semitism in many different Muslim communities. Not all, but many more than usual. And I wanted to do something about that as a Muslim woman. And that's how my journey kind of took off. That's it. That's about me.
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D
Thank you.
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B
Yeah.
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D
I thought I'd start by asking you to talk about the COVID illustration of the book. And I know cover illustrations are chosen differently for different books, and authors have different amounts of input, but. But then I'll just ask Manaz to go ahead and start. Maybe you could describe this image and say a little bit about why you all thought that this was the right way to introduce readers to the book and its subject.
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B
Okay. I mean, Mark has the story behind this, but I'll give you the sort of, like, why we like this image. So I feel like if you look at it, DP Nobody anywhere on his suitcase. You assume he's somewhere like Oriental Easter right in the background. And there's kind of a sadness and a rejection feeling from it. And, you know, the book speaks to a lot of that in terms of refugee status and movement, entrance into places. But also it's a global photograph or sketching, I would say, because of the strip in the back, the movement. So there's a movement about it. There's water displacement and travel. So I think that for me personally, that encapsulates it. And then I'm just going to hand it over to Mark, who can tell you the story. And then we, of course, two of us, did some research on this, but Mark, as the main story, I think.
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C
That was beautifully described. Minaz. So this is by a German Jewish artist named David Ludwig Bloch, and It's actually titled Mr. Nobody. Shanghai, completed in 1947. Now, Block had a really fascinating kind of life story. He was detained in 1937, interned at Dachau, so he was in prison and the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime. He eventually gets out of the camp, makes his way to Shanghai, later finds himself in the Shanghai ghetto. He is also a deaf artist. Clearly his time in China influences his art. Right. You can see it clearly on the COVID And so he is in China until 1949. He then immigrates to the United States, settles somewhere in the New York area. I believe it was Brooklyn, if I'm not mistaken. And so what I think you have here is a work of art that really encapsulates what this book is about. A major part of our book, a major part of the story, is about Jewish refugees, the lack of immigration opportunities. And I think Manaz hit it right on the head. You have movement in the background, right? A bustling city. You've got movement in terms of water. But this refugee isn't going anywhere, Right. His head is buried. Clearly he's been through a lot. He is stationary. He's got this suitcase that says, you know, displaced person. Nobody Anywhere, I will go anywhere. And unfortunately, in this moment, he can't find a home, can't find a place to situate himself. So when we kind of take, you know, took a step back and looked at all the wonderful chapters that comprise this book, I. It just, there was something about it. And, and I'll give the press credit, they absolutely allowed us to have input. And this is a work that Manaz and I both agreed we would say, please, pretty please, can this be the COVID There was no pushback. It was immediate. They said, absolutely. The designer did, I think, a wonderful job and I think it really does represent the book quite well.
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D
You have a really nicely written and comprehensive introduction. I'd just like to read a sentence from it. So this is page 7 for those of you who are reading along. Global Approaches to the Holocaust strives to connect all of us as a global human community through stories of birth, death, immigration and survival. And that seemed to me a good starting point for asking you what you hoped this book would accomplish and why you thought this was a necessary project. And Mark, go ahead.
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C
Well, actually, I might disagree. And I'm going to let Manaz go ahead. I'm a language freak. I know exactly who writes what. And Manaz, those were Minaz's words. So I'm going to let the author of those words take the lead on that, if that's okay.
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B
So, okay. So, you know, I think it's always very important for authors and audiences to understand how you kind of co edit a book together. And Mark and I have known each other for quite a. Quite a bit, and we've done workshops and worked together in conferences, et cetera. But Mark kind of said, hey, you know, there's this opportunity. You want to do something? And I was like, yes, I really want to do something. And he's like, really? What do you want to do? Like, he was. I said, well, I want to do something like international, you know, I want to bring the Holocaust to the world, you know, because I think that's part of who I am. I want people to have a memory of what happened to the Jews, but also be represented in some ways in the culture. And I know a lot of people are working on this kind of stuff. So let's kind of put this together. And you know, to be honest with you, Kelly, I wanted this to be in the classroom. Very important for me as an educator, as a teacher. You can take any chapter from this and teach it in a classroom and you can teach it to kids or, you know, undergraduates or Even graduate students that are from Mexico or from, you know, Argentina, from Palestine, from Morocco to Japan, so. Or Mauritius. Right. So there's a little bit of a story for everyone to kind of get into. Right. Whether it's the story of rejection, whether it's a story of memory, whether it's a story of representation of the Jew. And I think that this becomes very important for us educators pedagogically, which is how we teach for the audience and what we do with this material. I just was hoping, and I always hope this about my work is it just doesn't sit on the shelf, but it gets used by educators. And we asked our contributors to write it for education purposes. And some did, and some wrote very academically articles, but they still had, in those very highly academic articles, places where you could understand the synthesis of what they were saying. And I think that's very important. And for the audiences that are listening, it's very important because it's one thing to just have intellectual, academic language 24 7. But the impact is what I'm after as an educator, as an academic and as a person.
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C
Well said. Certainly demonstrating that the Holocaust can be understood as a global event, something that has global dimensions. I think one of the objectives of the book is also to just demonstrate how connected we all are. If you look at the linkages between, and this would probably be an example more familiar to a lot of your audience, between German Jews on the Ms. St. Louis and the people and governments of Cuba, the United States, Canada, and then on its return across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom, Belgium, I think the Netherlands, France, you know, several hundred German Jews who were on the Ms. St. Louis were later killed, of course, in German occupied Poland at places like Auschwitz and Sobibor. So I think global conflicts, crimes under occupation, refugee policies and the like, they impact all of us in one form or another. I don't think you can escape that. And I think that's an underlying current of the book. And I. And I think, you know, if we look at the historiography, if you were to type in Holocaust and Global, you will see books on the subject. And it's almost always exclusively through the lens of memory, which is a section that we have in the book. But we also look at it from the lens of history because it is an event that I think transcends continental Europe. I think it's clear enough in the book that we see those dimensions, but we also look at representation as well, how the Holocaust has been represented in museums, memorials right around the world, educational curricula in. In politics and politics in India, for example. So I think we. We try to demonstrate the global dimensions in a number of different categories, not simply through the lens of memory, which I think is what other scholars have done. Yeah.
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D
Maybe it's. Maybe it's appropriate right now to start with a section, a discussion of the history section, because that, as you say, much of that section is about questions of immigration or the refusal of the right to immigrate, of ways in which the Jewish Diaspora arrives or does not arrive in various places. So. So I thought I'd start by just saying I think most of our audience would assume that the takeaway from this book would be that largely Jews were refused admission and refuge. And so I thought I'd throw that as a question to you. Is that the right kind of conclusion from the set of essays? Manaz? Maybe I'll just ask you to start.
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's funny, but, you know, I was just thinking about the chapter on Mexico. Yeah, right. And thinking of like, the kind of like, you know, response in the 40s, right after World War II to 1973, and how that changed so much and drastically. So I think that why I think it's important to have, you know, different continents enter in this conversation is to understand that World War II was kind of a huge event that impacted everybody. Right. And not everybody was thinking of the Holocaust. And that's really important to me that people should know that Holocaust was not something that everybody knew about. Now, there is an author, Edward Kissi, who talks about the knowledge of the Holocaust in Africa and the press, and that's very interesting. But then you have an author like Omar Bohm, who talks about Jewish Muslim relations before World War II. Right. And this kind of pushback against the Nazi regime together as Jewish Arabs and Muslim Arabs. And I think that the question about, well, what did people welcome views or did they not? Was a question that was extremely complicated and nuanced, but a lot of the doors were shut. And even if they were welcomed, we find out through these wonderful essays, especially the historical ones and the memory ones, is that they weren't always treated right. Right. Or equally. They were seen as others or they were seen as complete victims. And then all of a sudden they were seen as aggressors. So there's this movement and there's nuance in these chapters that lead the path to say, oh, my God, like an island, like Mauritius took their Jews. Right. Unbelievable. Well, why was that? So you start to learn the history about these places and enter into conversation with different cultures, their own history. Like in South Africa with apartheid. Right. There's all these histories that you're learning through. And I think that's why this is essential for the classroom because it's not looking at the Holocaust as isolated, but the post impact of how we think about the Holocaust. Right. And how we can bring it to different audiences around the world and different nationalities in the United States and in Canada. So I think that's really important to me.
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See mint mobile.com and I think the authors really captured the nuance. So I, you know, Kelly, to your point, I think the takeaway is yes, indeed, the doors to Jewish refugees were largely closed. But there is nuance to some of these chapters and we do show exceptions. So the one that I think most clearly shows how the doors were closed were. It was a chapter by Richard Menkes, a professor at the University of British Columbia. And he has a very unique chapter in the sense that it's almost a history of a book.
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D
Yeah.
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C
So he looks at the impact of a landmark study in Canadian history called None Is Too Many Canada and the Jews of Europe. It's by Irving Abella and Harold Schoper, comes out in 1983. It's like an atom bomb that goes off in the field of Canadian history, Canadian Jewish studies. So the book reveals that while many countries were complicit in the Holocaust for their refusal to admit Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, the Canadian government did less than almost any other Western country to help Jewish refugees. Between the period that they look at 1933 and 1948, the authors estimate that only about 5,000 Jewish refugees entered Canada during that period. That's arguably the worst of any refugee receiving in the world. So Menkas asks, you know, how do Canadians remember this period and how has it impacted immigration since?
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D
Right.
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C
It's a very interesting chapter. One of the other standout chapters for me is by Rebecca or Beldig. Yeah. She looks at the Fort Ontario emergency refugee shelter. This is the first and only refugee center established in the United States during the Second World War. I'm pretty sure that's actually her next full length book project. So that shelter received nearly 1,000 refugees, of whom more than 90% were Jews. Right. And this is a very interesting story that I don't think has been told. And you know, when we look at nuance, there's Shanghai. If we think about Shanghai, Shanghai accepted more Jewish refugees than Canada, Australia, India. And there was pressure from Nazi Germany on Japan to take measures against the Jews. So there's all these interesting chapters that demonstrate sort of what you started with, that the doors were largely closed. But then we also see these exceptions. And as you expand your focus outward through a global lens, you see how the Philippines had. There was exceptions there. Shanghai, there were some exceptions there. Right. And that I think was what is exciting about the book. So I think the authors did a tremendous job kind of teasing out that nuance.
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D
Yeah. I was struck by the chapter on the Philippines as well and a line which I can't find immediately in the book that, er. Belding used about the Jews at Fort. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the name, but Ontario.
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B
Yeah.
- [24:19]
D
Being protected by the barbed wire that surrounded them, which was a striking image. Many of these. Let's go a different way. Many of these chapters, both in the history section and others, highlight individuals. The bureaucrat in the essay about Canada, that's place of concentration for the book that you mentioned. Sugihara, I believe, is the name of the Japanese diplomat. And then others are highlighting or sometimes simultaneously hiding big structural questions like unemployment or depression. And I wonder how you kind of wrestle with this kind of differing focus about how sometimes to answer these questions you're really concentrating on specific people or small groups of people and at the same time trying to invoke events of global scale. And I'll just start with Mark.
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C
Well, we can turn our attention to Sugihara. So Rotem counter Rans Wagenberg. Their chapter really looks at how the Japanese viewed both Auschwitz and the Holocaust as two Holocaust. So. But they have. And what drew us to them was their work on Sugihara. Right. Who helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing visas. So you have an example of an individual operating on behalf of a state in another part of the world. And yet he is remembered quite differently depending on the lens in which you look. That's why, I mean, by the way, just full disclosure, a lot of these chapters could fit in any number of these sections that we have. We have memory, we have history. And we have representation sometimes. There was a good healthy debate between Manaz and I where they actually fit. And Sugihara is certainly one of those chapters where. Or one of those figures that could fit in any of the, any of the sections. But if you look at it, or at least him from the lens of Japan, the Japanese certainly frame him as a hero. But at the same time it's also a way to excuse wartime crimes. Right. Look at all the good that this individual did. Right. And that's what we should maybe be remembering. Right. That becomes a very tricky thing in Israel. It becomes a righteous among the nations type situation. Lithuania, my goodness, where he was operating. Lithuania. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered over the German occupation. Right. Almost wiped out the entire population. And so Shigehara is used to reorient that fact. Right. So you have these large scale kind of histories and how we represent and remember the Holocaust and countries complicity in that and how the memory is being manipulated over time. Right. In the research of Counter and Zwigenberg, they talk about Anne Frank as well and how the Japanese fascination with Anne Frank is quite peculiar. They focus on her story more as a coming of age tale, minimizing her Jewishness and the reasons for her persecution. So I think there's a way that memory can, can manipulate the past, can kind of COVID over darker parts of a country's history. And I think that's something that also comes out in a lot of these chapters.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to add that in terms of memory, there's a term that I've been working with in this new manuscript I'm writing called nostalgic dissonance. So we all have nostalgia and longing. We want to see things in some kind of way, but we're not always aligned with how we're actually having that memory in that moment. And I think that that's something that the chapters are doing, especially the ones in memory and representation. And then, you know, like for me, you talk about specific figures. I mean, Omar Bhum talks about his father. Right. Faragy Bohm, and then talks about how the songs change and what's the difference, you know, between the Karafa songs. And I'm like, wow, who would have known that? But it was a communal sort of understanding of what was going on done in sonic ways. Right. So I think that, you know, this book is never complete, Kelly. Right. There's so much more to do. And I know that there are people who are doing a lot of similar work. We couldn't put everybody in this book, but I think it starts a conversation in a way that can be enriched by culture, history, memory and representation and bring it to audiences that normally you wouldn't get an interest from. I think also having specific things on the Muslim or Arab world is extremely important because people are shying away from that. But I think it's important to have this dialogue and this conversation, even though it may be negative history or omission of the Holocaust history, we need to have that dialogue. And I think that's why I'm very proud of the book.
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D
Yeah, that chapter on music and poetry was really delightful. It was different than most of the rest of the book, and it was really, really nice to read. You've talked a lot about education. For those of the listeners who kind of followed this podcast in a linear way, they will know that pretty recently I interviewed Maureen Hebert and Jim Waller about Holocaust education and the failures of Holocaust education. And some of the chapters in your book are pretty pessimistic about the state of education on the Holocaust in the global world, especially in India and South Asia and, and the Middle East. And so I wonder what did working on these chapters with the author tell you about what education should about the Holocaust, what should be its goal, and how should we think about its success all these decades after the Holocaust? Mark, I'll just ask you to start.
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C
Yeah. So just to kind of recap the chapter on India by Navrus A Free it's not. It's not only about education, but it's also about how extremists use the Holocaust. So it explores how the Holocaust has been been used and manipulated by anti Semites Islamophobes in India. It talks about the lack of Holocaust education in many way. It highlights that there are extremists in India again, extremists who revere Hitler have called for a genocide against Muslims in India. And Manaz, I'm going to have to beg your pardon here because I keep, I often in public talks, rip Manaz off completely. But she said something that I think was so profound in our preparation for one of our talks a couple of months ago. And she made the point that if we want Holocaust education to reach areas where it is not studied, where it has been forgotten, then it can help if we can include in a genuine way, in a meaningful way, these places in the story. And I think Manaz's work, for example, on the Holocaust in the Muslim world, the Arab world, I think, really, really does that in many ways. Right. So. And that's what I what drew me to Navra Safridi's chapter. And by the way, there's no relation between that of Freedy and this Afridi because of course, he is talking about the failure, right? But it's also failure due to a lack of education. There is, you know, again, there is nuance to this book. We have a chapter by Tali Nates that I thought was just a really well written chapter. And she looks at the case of Holocaust museums and education in South Africa, and she shows how the Holocaust has been used to teach about extremism and the prevention of human rights abuses in Africa, which I thought was really interesting. But just incidentally, teaching about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is actually mandated by the national curriculum in South Africa. And one of the things I drew from that was maybe that the distance of the subject actually helps students in South Africa, in Africa, grapple with some of the issues that they're facing. Right? So again, there is nuance. There's clearly failure. There is no question that there has been failure. But there are also some success stories, too. I think that they're also important to draw from.
- [33:03]
B
And yeah, I mean, I'd like to speak to that for a minute because I think it's. It's a very big question, right? I mean, there's all these reports in the United States whether it's claim conference reports, adl saying, you know what, it. Look how terribly we've done with Holocaust education. Right? I mean, it's not really mandated, first of all, in all states. I mean, your audience should know that. I think there's about nine right now that it's mandated in terms of Holocaust education, the public sector, Right. I also want to say that Holocaust education has been politicized. And I'm not talking about October 7th, everybody, but I'm talking about the word Holocaust has been politicized. In my first book, I use the word Shoah for that very reason. And it was a word that I wanted to give to the Holocaust because it means catastrophe, but also to recognize that it had its own kind of place of memory and acknowledgement. So I think we have to keep. You know, we have. And I think the question of has Holocaust education failed? Is an interesting one to ask, right? Because does it mean that the Jews have failed or we have stopped recognizing the 6 million Jews that died? Right? So that's one problem, right? Holocaust education has been politicized. The second problem is that Holocaust education is seen as an elitist area of study, which is another problem of Politicization, but also because here in the United States, and I've done some surveys around the world, we do give a lot of money to Holocaust studies versus say even Netherlands, right? Or even France. So there is this kind of imbalance in terms of what we put into Holocaust education. There are museums in D.C. the museum in New York City, Illinois Holocaust Museum. I mean, these are huge places compared to what we see in even Western Europe, right, Which does carry on some of the Holocaust education. So there's a certain kind of elitism in that. And the third part of it, Kelly, is that it's always been seen as a white Christian male study. And nothing against white male Christians, everybody here. But I have to say it because you're asked that question and you have to name it, and I think that has also given it a sort of like closed door policy. You know, it's like we. I'm not a historian, I'm religious studies and I can work with historians. I'm, I've been doing history, right. I change the Holocaust. So there's this kind of idea of like claiming it right, in a way and not letting it kind of disseminate in different areas or, or to trust people with Holocaust studies. And I think that is something that has to be worked out within Holocaust and genocide studies, right. And how we, how we look at that. So I see it as three different issues, but very important issues, I think.
- [36:23]
D
Yeah, that's a fascinating answer. You've given me lots, lots to think about. As I think about the essays, this is not universally true, but many of the essays I read, accounts of people wrestling with the tension of remembering and learning and educating about the Holocaust from a global universalist perspective.
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B
Right?
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D
We need to think about never again, no matter where, no matter when. But the tension involved in help, having an understanding and education of the Holocaust help shed light on or preserve memories of local contexts of apartheid or wrestle with local context of what it means to remember apartheid or what it means to remember the dictatorship in Brazil or Chile or Argentina. I wonder how you all thought about that tension. About what? Thinking about the Holocaust, what Remembering and representing Holocaust, what purpose it should serve. Minaz, I'll just let you go first and reflect on that.
- [37:25]
B
I mean, I think again, I think that Holocaust education also teaches people not to be prejudiced. That's sort of the goal, right, of how we teach. And I think that in that prejudice you start to realize that this kind of memory and representation is real and it's still part of the present. So I think that there's an arc of Holocaust education that teaches about prejudice lessons, propaganda, you know, conspiracies. You could, you know, it has a lot there richness about it that I think is important in terms of representation of who we are today, how we represent Jews in our society, quote, unquote. Right. What are the tropes? How do we see these tropes? And you know, when I'm teaching, and I just taught my class, Muslims in the Holocaust, my students recognize the tropes right now and they point them out, they're like, wait a second, Dr. Fredi, isn't this what was in the Protocols of Zion? I saw this tweet. Can you look at it? So I mean, I think that that's important to make this connection. And I think it's important for them to understand that Jews were seen as subhuman. And I think that actually has a very interesting reaction from young people and from audiences when you put it that way. So I think that is what is really, I think, urgent today in terms of the increasing number of antisemites and the permissibility of antisemitism in a way that I haven't really witnessed.
- [39:09]
C
Yeah. There's no question that there's a local dimension, there's a regional and national dimension, and of course, there's a global dimension. It makes me think, as we're having this conversation about the concept of the nativization of the Holocaust, right. Which was a lot of articles written about that maybe 20 years ago, that when you explore the Holocaust from the perspective of the United States, it's going to that history. That, that, that telling of that story will look invariably different. Right. And. And I know we're going to probably get to this. I think you had mentioned talking about maybe sort of how we end the book with a little bit of tension. So I won't kind of jump ahead, but I do think that this book challenges how we conceptualize the Holocaust. You know, I've said it before, I think the book challenges the geographic. Not only the geographic, but also the chronologic dimensions of the Holocaust. Right. This is a watershed moment in European history, I think. And this is one of the opening quotes in that first chapter. A definition of the Holocaust is European gentiles killing European Jews. That can be a definition of the Holocaust. Right. But is it entirely contained within the European continent? So, for example, we've been talking about Omar Boom. He and Sarah Stein have written this wonderful book on North Africa and the Holocaust. Right. North African Jews were killed, were deported and killed in Camps during the Holocaust. Right. This makes North Africa a part of Holocaust history. Manaz was asked to assess a report, I believe I forget your involvement on Alderney, the island in the Channel Islands, in the English Channel. Excuse me. Alderney was the, as I understand it, furthest west Nazi Germany ever established a camp. Right. This isn't continental Europe. Right. We like to think that, you know, the uk, unlike, you know, France and the Low Countries, did not fall, but the Channel Islands were occupied. Right. So that makes little, teeny, tiny Alderney. It makes the Holocaust part of their history as well. Right. So I think there is this tension and I think, you know, and we, we may talk about it now. How far can you go in terms of the topics that you cover within the domain of, of the Holocaust? Right. And that that creates some tension. Are you losing the central focus of the field, which is the genocide of European Jews? Right.
- [41:51]
D
So it's inherent in the nature of doing an interview about a collection of essays that we talk about kind of high level themes and conclusions. But. But I wanted each of you to have a chance of talking about one specific chapter and one specific moment or case study or person or place. And so, Mahnaz, I wonder if there's a chapter that's particularly memorable to you that you want to talk to the readers about and about what the argument was and why you found it so compelling.
- [42:20]
B
Well, I mean, I wanted to talk about Omar Bohem's chapter, but I'm not going to do that. But I actually really want to talk about Mohamed Dijani Dawdi and Zainabarakat's article. They wrote it together. And I think it's important for me because I think these are two people who are Palestinian that are trying to bring to us as readers the lack of Holocaust education and the politicization of that. And I think that when they say, I'm just going to read this, that the problem is that the Holocaust is not necessarily denied in a lot of these narratives, but it's relativized. Right. And we find that with the case of Turkey and Armenia, in terms of the fog of war. So I think that that's something really important that they're trying to point out in this chapter, which becomes a barrier of this education. Right. So if it didn't really happen the way it's been described, then why should we study it? Right. So that's the first thing that I think is really important. The other thing that I think is really important is that they pull out these writers that are talking about how Jews killed 80,000 Germans and tortured 3 million more. Right. These are novelists, right? These are stories we don't hear. Right? Because we're not reading this as Arabic readers or like, just, you know, as novels or, you know, An Eye for an Eye, the story of Jews who sought revenge for the Holocaust. Right. This is John Sachs book that has been adapted. Or the Gilbert Achar, the Arabs and the Holocaust. Right. The Arab is really war. So I think that this chapter, even though it has a lot of political things, it's talking about the literature that is proliferating. Just like, say, we look at our United States or I live in New York, right? So what am I seeing during a certain campaign or a certain conversation about the representation of, say, Jews or Muslims, especially now with the vote for Mamdani, is that I have to look at myself and say, what am I reading? And is this propaganda? Right. And I think that we need to give each other that chance as human beings and laypeople to say, okay, if this is how I've been constructed, how do I kind of introduce a new narrative that might not be obstructionist, but might allow a dialogue to happen? And I think that's what this chapter does. I think this is what Omara is doing. And I'm interested, of course, in those areas, Although I do a lot of work on the Holocaust in different areas in Europe. So I would say that that would be, for me, something I would really encourage the audience to read, to kind of get an understanding and not to get angry or backfire at it, but to say, wow, this is what the audiences are getting, and that's important information for all of us here. And I think that makes a difference for even young people when they say, oh, this is how what they're seeing. Look at what I'm seeing on my phone, right? Every day. And how am I constructed? So I think that that mirror image is so important for us.
- [45:55]
D
Thank you. Mark, what about you?
- [45:57]
C
Yeah. Despite the fact that we're talking about history, it's almost uncanny of just how many of these chapters seem to resonate and Echo in 2025. One of the chapters that I just kind of inspired by what the conversation has been here by Paul Bartrop. It's called Limiting the Undesirables. It was really almost like a happy accident that that chapter can kind of align very closely and eerily similar to Richard Menkens's chapter on None Is Too Many and the support of the Doors to Canada to Jewish Refugees. And Bartrop, he's So meticulous shows in great, great detail just how the Australian government was so unsympathetic to Jews fleeing Nazism. Right. There was really an anti refugee agenda in Australia and those few Jews who did enter the country found these small little gaps and small little holes. And it had really very little to do with the Australian government who were doing their utmost to keep closed and to prevent them from entering the country. So you have these parallels where you think, is this just a one off? Well, Canada and Australia, yes, I understand they're Commonwealth countries, but they're very far apart and yet had very similar policies. And it gives you an idea in terms of when we get to 1945 and we are entering the post war period. Certainly Jews did not want to go back to Hungary or Lithuania or Poland. Where do you go? Where can you go? Canada, United States, Australia. These doors are sealed shut. Mandatory Palestine, Good luck. You'll end up being detained by the very people that liberated you from the camps. Right. So I think this is a chapter that really, really resonates for me and it has some interesting parallels with some of the other chapters in the book. So I would actually call out that chapter in particular.
- [48:01]
D
No, those are both great chapters. I'm struck with the Bartrop and many of the other chapters about the way in which the technicalities of systems and of categorizations. The difference between refugees and immigrants, for instance, makes such a difference in the lives of ordinary people who. Who are reliant on other people's understanding of systems and laws and labels to determine their fate. We're approaching the end of our time, but I did want to ask you, Mark, you referred to this earlier. You write a conclusion that reads much differently than the rest of the book in ways that I think are really fruitful. Can you maybe briefly. I'm looking at the time. So maybe briefly tell the story of either Charles Bliss or Guida Blumenthal and then talk about what you wanted to do with that conclusion.
- [48:50]
C
Yeah, that was. I mean it was interesting. Really kind of proud of the story, but it didn't fit anywhere. Like that was actually part of the introduction. So we completely. We wrote two introductions, two full blown 30 page introductions and I can be pretty hard on myself. So we took a jackhammer and then decided that wasn't enough. We just scrapped it completely and rewrote it from scratch after we got some really wonderful feedback from the blind reviewers. So it ends up being an epilogue. The part that I wrote on Charles K. Bliss, who is just an. An absolutely fascinating individual this might be an interesting way to even end the interview because in a lot of ways it parallels the COVID Yes, these are two Jews, one Austrian, one German, who both end up in Shanghai. So Charles K. Bliss, he's an Austrian Jew born in the Austro Hungarian Empire in a town that is actually now part of Ukraine. He was a volunteer in the First World War, so saw the horrors of war, post war period. Goes to university, gets an education. After Nazi Germany absorbs Austria, he is arrested, is interned in both Dachau and Buchenwald. His wife is actually a Roman Catholic. This is his second wife, actually. And she secures his release in April 1939. From there he immediately leaves continental Europe. He goes to England. He change, changes his name. His name, his original name was Blitz for obvious reasons. He changed it to Bliss during the German bombardment of, of. Of London. And from there he goes to Canada. He makes his way to Canada and. But fails to secure residency in the country, as I, you know, as the menus chapter already indicates. He travels across the country, boards a ship headed for Japan. Once in Japan, he makes his way to Shanghai, reunites with his wife. He eventually ends up in the Shanghai ghetto, just like the artist of our cover, David Ludwig Bloch, and is there really until the end of the war. In the post war period, he immigrates as a refugee to Australia. So what do we have there? We have like six countries, four continents, countless towns and cities. So I think the experience of Bliss reveals just by his story alone, just the global scale of the Holocaust. As he tries to find safety and protection somewhere. It shows how the global community directly, indirectly, knowingly, unwittingly became implicated in the Holocaust. So I thought it was a story that I just didn't want to let go of. I felt like it had a place in this book.
- [51:25]
B
He really didn't want to let go of it.
- [51:28]
C
So I'm glad you asked me about that. And then Lance Stevans has a really good creative chapter at the end of the book that I thought it kind of paralleled quite nicely. So I think there's something in the story of Charles Bliss that, that is representative of what we did. And by the way, Bliss is just an endlessly fascinating guy. He created his own language, known in shorthand as Bliss symbols. So if you think about, you know, the ability to communicate, it was used for children who had some various challenges in terms of communicating. And so, you know, here we are with this book, having sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, literary scholars, religious studies, experts, et cetera, all trying to communicate about the Holocaust from their own particular fields of study in this very global way, which I thought Bliss's story kind of symbolized in a lot of ways, especially his work on communication and the ability to communicate difficult subject matter over time, space.
- [52:29]
B
Yeah. And I think Stavan's piece on Guida Blumenthal does that as well. Like the journey. Right. So there's a journey we're on, and there. There could. Anything could happen. Right. You could miss a boat, or you could be rescued, or you could not be rescued. So I think that there's an existential sort of story at the complete end in terms of Stavens. That's why we put him in the end, because he didn't really kind of belong and the whole volume. But I thought it was such a beautiful way to kind of think about people who didn't make it.
- [53:04]
C
Yeah, that chapter is brilliant. It's family history. There's also elements of fiction. There's elements of history, literature, philosophy. He just.
- [53:17]
B
Everything. Yeah.
- [53:19]
C
And it's. And it's just. I think it's actually a beautiful way to end the book, which is why we. We close with that. It's very powerful piece.
- [53:26]
D
Well, that seems a good time to close the interview. I always, always end with a couple questions that are divorced but related to the book. The first, and I'll ask you to start, manaz, is just if you could suggest to the audience or me, or both, what is a book or a play or a movie or something that was meaningful to you, that's related to this topic that you would suggest that. That we read or watch. For those of you who are academics, we're coming to the end of the fall semester. We have this moment of bliss where we think at least that we can read something that we want to read. What should that be?
- [54:05]
B
You know, it's funny. I just taught Omar Baum's book Journey Undesirables Journey to North Africa. It's a graphic novel, actually worked really well in my class. And it's a story about a German Jew who ends up in Algeria, then in Morocco, and then you get to witness what's going on with the Arab Muslims there. But it's just fabulous because it's a story that brought students in. And also just for me, myself, you know, I like graphic novels. I think they can be really great. And the images and kind of the illustrator was amazing with certain things in that you wouldn't see normally during the Holocaust. But you're in a totally different place now. You're in North Africa, but you start in, in Germany, you know, you start in proper Germany and you, you go with Hans all the way towards the end of his journey. And it's really interesting. I really recommend that. It's literally like a two hour read, but it's a, a good, good book to read to start thinking about, you know, the journey of, of Jews, but also the journey of Jews in the Arab world and also what were the Muslim Arabs thinking? And they were bystanders, they were perpetrators, and they indeed were rescuers and befriended a lot of Jews. So I think those are important stories. And so, you know, so for me I would recommend that especially for a general audience. It's a perfect book to pick up.
- [55:46]
D
And for listeners who didn't quite grab their pen quickly enough. The author and title again are.
- [55:51]
B
It's called A Journey to North Africa by Omar Bhum B o U m. It's a graphic novel.
- [56:01]
C
Yeah.
- [56:01]
D
What about you, Mark?
- [56:02]
C
I read that book and I would also recommend and Omar is a friend, so anytime we get to shine some light on him. But, but in terms of books that, that kind of had an impact on us or at least on me while writing this book. There's a landmark study. I don't remember when it came out in English, but in Germany it was 2001. So it's, you know, more than 20 years now. And it's called the Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age by Daniel Levy and Nathan Schneider. And it's basically about how the Holocaust is remembered globally. But they actually use case studies, they look at it from exclusively from Israel, the perspective of Israel, Germany and the United States. And you know, I always wanted to make sure that we were making something that was going to be an original contribution. Right. Like we are not the first to, to look at the Holocaust from a global perspective. Right. So that book is just a landmark book, I think one of the first of its kind. So I made sure that I reread it. There's a couple of other books that kind of echo the type of work we do. But also I think it shows that, you know, we've taken a bit of a different direction here. Another one's Marking Evil, Amos Goldberg and that examines global discourses and memory of the Holocaust. So the Holocaust in conversation with other things. And then actually a shout out to one of the wonderful scholars who endorsed our book, Alan Steinweiss and others have a book on Holocaust memory and a globalizing world World. Again, that's a book that focuses very exclusively on memory. There's many Chapters on Europe and Israel. But I do remember there was chapters, I believe, on India as well. That one's a bit more global in its approach, but again from that perspective of memory. So I was being very influenced by how these scholars have tackled this subject. And that's why the additional aspects of history and representation, I think allows our book to maybe separate itself a bit more. And so I would recommend those three books if you. If there are audience members who would like to read more in this vein. I think those are three of the best on the subject.
- [58:06]
D
Excellent. Thank you. Well, the book came out earlier this year and academics tend to share a certain character trait, which I will kindly say curiosity. And my wife might say overwork. I'm guessing you both are working on additional projects. Would you like to share where your interests are leading you now? Mark, I'll start with you.
- [58:29]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So this is a fairly productive year for me. So I'm going to have two books out this year. Global Approaches is the first and then the next one in February. It's my first foray into the world of comics graphic art. Your audience need not worry. I'm not drawing anything. We have a very talented artist, Miriam Lubicki. The book is called Two Roses and it's about a Polish Jew named Rose Lifc who. Who survives the war hiding in plain sight as a Polish Gentile doing forced labor in Nazi Germany. She poses with her aunt as her sister. They have to pretend that they're sisters and Miriam Lubicki is the artist. I'm co editing the book with Dr. Charlotte Chayet at the University of Victoria. Timothy Snyder wrote the forward. We're expecting, you know, or hopeful that this book will reach a large audience. Rose has won, has received the Order of Canada for her lifetime work in Holocaust education. She eventually immigrated to Canada where. Where I am from and. And she's still with us. And so it's a massive project where historians, artists, survivors, et cetera, work together to co create this story. So we did interviews with Rose. Those interviews were the basis for the dialogue that Miriam creates within her graphic art book. And the book is done. It's now in the proofing stages. Actually just moved beyond the proofing stages. So we're looking forward to seeing that out in print in February. So that's my next big project.
- [60:09]
D
Excellent.
- [60:09]
B
See, I'm going to teach your book now, the graphic. At least you have the first buyer here. What am I working on? I'm working on. It's called the Wounded Muslim Memory and Tragedy. And it's a book on Muslims and genocide. So I really took my lessons from Holocaust studies. And I feel like we never really see the Muslim as being the victim. That's why I call it the Wounded Muslim. And I discuss, you know, the Rohingya genocide, Bosnia, the Uyghurs. And I'm thinking. And I also will have a chapter on Palestine, for sure. So just to bring knowledge to people who are, you know, not looking at those things. I think that's an. That's what I'm working on. And my deadline's in August, so I'm really moving right now. So next year.
- [61:11]
D
Excellent. I've been talking today with Mark Salensak and Mahnaz Afridi, co editors of Global Approaches to the Memory, History and Representation, published by University of Nebraska Press. I should say it's part of a really interesting series of books that are designed to provide a way for authors to reach interested amateurs who are interested in the subject. So I encourage you to go out to look for Manaz and Mark's book, but also the other books in the series. Those sound like great projects. I hope that when they're done, you'll come back on the show and talk with me again. But until then, thank you so much, Mark and Manaz. I really appreciate your time and I wish you the best of endings to your semester.
- [61:57]
B
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Cohen, I gotta go grade now.