Sonoma State University 2018 Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series

RESCUERS & SURVIVORS
Study the nature of hate: Prevent the escalation of prejudice into genocide

January 23: GENOCIDE, RESISTANCE AND RESCUE
Professor Emerita Myrna Goodman, Ph.D., Sonoma State University

January 30: PERPETRATORS ON THE PERIPHERY OF GENOCIDE: ITALIAN POLICE DURING THE HOLOCAUST
Alexis Herr, Ph.D., Saul Kagan Postdoctoral Fellow, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

February 6: THE HOLOCAUST, HISTORICAL LEGACIES, AND LOCAL POLITICS
Professor Evgeny Finkel, Ph.D., George Washington University

February 13: LILLIAN JUDD: SURVIVOR AND ACTIVIST (film)
Dennis Judd, Holocaust descendant

February 20: A SURVIVOR’S STORY
Hans Angress, Holocaust survivor

February 27: RESCUERS AND SURVIVORS IN THE ISRAELI CONTEXT
Professor Ziv Rubinovitz, Ph.D., Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Sonoma State University

MARCH 6: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Professor Sergio La Porta, Ph.D., CSU Fresno Armenian Studies Program

March 13: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: LEGACIES OF SURVIVAL
Maral N. Attallah, Ph.D., Distinguished Lecturer, Humboldt State University

March 27: GENERATIONS OF MEMORY: VIOLENCE, ACTIVISM, AND MEMORY IN ARGENTINA
Prof. Kerry Whigham, Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University

April 3: BECOMING EVIL
Professor James Waller, Ph.D., Cohen Endowed Chair of Holocaust
and Genocide Studies, Keene State College

April 10: GENDER AND GENOCIDE
Professor Carol Rittner, RSM, Distinguished Professor Emerita,
Stockton University

April 17th: CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE
Julie Ea and Lucia Roncalli, M.D.

April 24: SYRIAN GENOCIDE
Professor David McCuan, Ph.D., Sonoma State University

May 1: AMERICAN GENOCIDE
Professor Benjamin Madley, Ph.D., UCLA

May 8: RWANDAN GENOCIDE
Her Excellency Mathilde Mukantabana, Rwandan Ambassador to the United States;
Simon Mudahogora, Rwandan Survivor; and Ndahiro Bazimya, Rwandan Genocide descendant

Click here for parking and map information

Please like our Facebook page at Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide to receive information on each of the speakers in the series and Holocaust and Genocide related events in the community.

Interests: Arts & Culture

Date:

January 23, 2018 to May 08, 2018

TIME:

12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

Location:

Ives Hall (Warren Auditorium, ground floor)
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Avenue

City:

Rohnert Park

Cost:

All lectures are free and open to the public. A daily parking permit ($5.00) is required at all times, but it is not valid in reserved lots. Permit machines accept cash and major credit cards.

Organized By:

Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide,

Co-organizers:

The Holocaust Lecture Series is sponsored by the Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, the Paul V.
Benko Holocaust Education Endowment, the Armenian Genocide Memorial Lecture Fund, the Adele Zygielbaum
Endowment, the Thomas Family Foundation, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, the Sonoma
State Students’ Instructionally Related Activities (IRA) Fund, and the Jewish Community Federation (JCF) of San
Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.

Event Contact Person:

Barbara Lesch McCaffry

707.585.2291

alliance@sonoma.edu

Event Website:

http://www.sonoma.edu/holocaust/

Speakers:

Myrna Goodman

Sonoma State University Professor Emerita of Sociology, Myrna Goodman is also the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide. She is a graduate of Sonoma State University (B.A. Sociology 1988) and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of California, Davis. Professor Goodman's dissertation was an analysis of the contributions of ideology, culture and political process in the formation of the Danish Resistance Movement and the rescue of the Jews in Denmark during World War II. She taught at Sonoma State from 1990-2013.

Alexis Herr

Alexis Herr, Ph.D., Pearl Resnik Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum taught at Keene State College as a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies from 2014-16. She received her Ph.D. from Clark University in 2014. While in residence this year at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Professor Herr will expand her research on deportations in order to analyze the greater network of regional Italian officials’ involvement in enacting a complex system of persecution and deportation of Jews. This study proposes the first history of Italian perpetrators, and in doing so, challenges commonly held assumptions about the so-called brava gente (benevolent Italians) and complicates our understanding of Italian perpetrators on the periphery of genocidal killing.

Evgeny Finkel

Professor Evgeny Finkel of George Washington University, was born in Ukraine and grew up in Israel. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his B.A. degree. His M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics.

His research interests include political violence, genocide, East European and Israeli politics. Professor Finkel is the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017). The work presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance and focuses on three Jewish communities—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok— to try to understand why Jews in these communities had very different responses when faced with similar Nazi policies.

Dennis Judd

Holocaust descendant Dennis Judd will introduce and discuss the recently completed film about his mother, The Lillian Judd Story.

Lillian Judd, was born in Uzhorod, Czechoslovakia. In 1938, when she was 14 years old, the Hungarians under Hitler occupied the city. In 1944, Lillian, her three sisters, and her parents were deported to Auschwitz after being housed in a brick factory for six weeks. Just before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, she arrived at Bergen-Belsen where she and her sister were liberated. After moving to Sonoma County in in 1990’s she began to share her story with hundreds of young people and spoke frequently in this series. Lillian died on June 6, 2016.

Lillian’s son Dennis says that “the reality of the horror and atrocities that my parents went through continues on through me and my children. That extra layer of reality as the son of a survivor of the Holocaust that I carried in my childhood continues to impact me even today. I am very aware of the need to make the world a better place for everyone.”

Sergio La Porta

Sergio La Porta, Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State, will be discussing “The Armenian Genocide.”

Professor La Porta holds a master’s and doctoral degree from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages. Since 2009 he has served as the Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies at Fresno State University. Prior to that, he taught Armenian and Religious Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Professor La Porta, who has spoken several times in this series, always provides an accessible and highly informative lecture that also illuminates the connection between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.

Maral N. Attallah, Ph.D.

Maral N. Attallah, Ph.D., Humboldt State University Distinguished Lecturer, will be speaking on “Armenian Genocide: Legacies of Survival”

Professor Attallah’s areas of specialization include comparative genocide studies, race and ethnic relations, and identity politics. She pays particular attention to issues of colonization, immigration, and recognition of genocide and genocide denial. Her scholarship focuses heavily on exposing the perspectives and voices of marginalized groups in society.

She has been a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. Professor Attallah has presented her research on genocide denial at national and international conferences and is recognized by genocide scholars as an emerging expert on the Armenian Genocide.

Professor Kerry Whigham

Professor Kerry Whigham of Columbia University will be speaking on “Generations of Memory: Violence, Activism, and Memory in Argentina.”

Professor Whigham received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. His doctoral research focused on the social and affective force of genocidal violence. His dissertation—entitled Affective Echoes: Affect, Resonant Violence, and the Processing of Collective Trauma in Post-Genocidal Societies—examines an array of memory practices that have emerged in post-conflict societies that respond to and transform this violence, including practices of social activism and the construction of memorials and other sites of memory. He conducted field work for his dissertation in Argentina, Germany, Poland, and the United States.

He currently holds a Postdoctoral Research position at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, as well as a member of the faculty consortium for Stockton University's graduate certificate program in genocide prevention and the Academic Program Officer for Online Education at the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.

Dr. James Waller

Professor Waller is also regularly involved, in his role as Academic Programs Director with the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR), as the curriculum developer and lead instructor for the Raphael Lemkin Seminars for Genocide Prevention. These seminars, held on-site and in conjunction with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, introduce diplomats and government officials from around the world to issues of genocide warning and prevention.

Waller’s book on perpetrators of genocide, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002), was praised for “clearly and effectively synthesizing a wide range of studies to develop an original and persuasive model of the process by which people can become evil.” Waller’s latest book is Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Dr. Carol Rittner, RSM,

Dr. Carol Rittner, RSM, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust & Genocide Studies and the Dr. Marsha Raticoff Grossman Professor of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University, will be discussing “Gender and Genocide.”

She is the author or editor of 16 books and numerous essays in various scholarly and educational journals about the Holocaust and other genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her most recent publications include The Holocaust and the Christian World (2000); Will Genocide Ever End? (2004), No Going Back: Letters to Pope Benedict XVI (2009); Learn Teach Prevent: Holocaust Education in the 21st Century (2011); and Violence Against Women (2011). She co-edited is Rape as a Weapon of War and Genocide (2012) with Professor John K. Roth.
Dr. Rittner was the Executive Producer of The Courage to Care, an Academy Award-nominated (1986) documentary film about non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, and Triumph of Memory (1987), a documentary film about non-Jews who survived Nazi concentration camps during WW II and the Holocaust. She is also the Executive Producer of a documentary film about nuns in America entitled Sisters.
Dr. Rittner’s current research interests include the history of the Jewish Community that used to live in Derry, Northern Ireland, rescue during the Holocaust and other genocides, and the use of rape as a weapon of war and genocide.

Cambodian Genocide descendant Julie Ea

Ms. Ea was an international intern for the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, will speak on the Cambodian Genocide. She has been involved with civil rights and social action, disaster and humanitarian relief, and poverty alleviation including a position as a development coordinator for Global Children Cambodia. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Politics from New York University. While at NYU she spent a term at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus studying twenty-first century international human rights.

Lucia Roncalli, M.D.

Dr. Roncalli has had a lifelong commitment to human rights. She has been doing medical and psychological evaluations of survivors of atrocity from all over the world since 2007. She is currently affiliated with Vista Health Centers in Sonoma County and is in the process of developing a longitudinal health and human rights curriculum for the Santa Rosa Family Medicine residency. She has been working with members of the local Cambodian community. She has degrees in East Asian Studies, Global Mental Health and Refugee Trauma, and in public health.

Professor David McCuan

Dr. McCuan joined the Political Science faculty of SSU in Fall 2003. His doctorate was granted from the University of California - Riverside in 2002.

He does research in two areas: state and local elections and the study of terrorism. His teaching responsibilities include courses in both international and national politics, international security and terrorism, state and local politics, campaigns and elections, and political behavior.

Dr. McCuan was a Fulbright Teaching Scholar in 2009-2010, working in the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic where he taught courses in US National Security Policy, Terrorism, and US Foreign Policy.

Professor Benjamin Madley

UCLA History Professor Benjamin Madley will be speaking on the “American Genocide,” based upon his first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, the Charles Redd Center / Phi Alpha Theta Award for the Best Book on the American West, the California Book Awards Gold Medal for Californiana, the Heyday Books History Award, and the Norman Neuerburg Award from the Historical Society of Southern California.
Professor Madley is an historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, he spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border where he became interested in the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples. He writes about American Indians as well as colonial genocides in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach. His current research explores Native American labor in the making of the western United States. Professor Madley received a B.A., M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in History from Yale. He also received a M.St. degree in History from Oxford University.

Her Excellency Mathilde Mukantabana, Rwandan Ambassador to the United States

Her Excellency Mathilde Mukantabana, Rwandan Ambassador to the United States, will be joined by Simon Mudahogora, a Genocide survivor, and Ndahiro Bazimya, a Genocide descendant, to discuss the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsis and the subsequent recovery of the Republic of Rwanda.

Fluent in English, French, Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, Ambassador Mukantabana holds a Bachelors degree in History and Geography from the University of Burundi as well as a Masters degree in Social Work with special emphasis in Community Organization, Planning and Administration and a Masters of Arts in History from California State University in Sacramento.

Prior to her appointment, Ambassador Mathilde Mukantabana was a tenured Professor of History at Cosumnes River College (CRC) in Sacramento, California from 1994 to 2013. She is also co-founder and President of Friends of Rwanda Association (F.O.R.A), a non-profit American relief association created in the wake of the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. Since its inception, FORA’s dual purpose has been to expand the circle of friends of Rwanda and to support survivors of 1994 Genocide through a variety of initiatives and relief efforts. In addition, under the aegis of United Nations for Development Programs (UNDP), Ambassador Mukantabana started the academic program of Social Work at the National University of Rwanda in 1999, and as an Invited Lecturer taught a variety of subjects in their summer program.

In addition, Simon Mudahogora, a Genocide survivor, and Ndahiro Bazimya, a Genocide descendant, will discuss growing up as cousins after the Genocide.