Alon Confino Noon Lunch Talk & 6:30 PM Master Class
Alon Confino Noon Lunch Talk & 6:30 PM Master Class
Professor Alon Confino (UVA) will discuss his article ("Why Did the Nazis Burn the Hebrew Bible? Nazi Germany, Representations of the Past, and the Holocaust," Journal of Modern History volume 84, no. 2 (June 2012): 369-400) over lunch. The article forms a chapter of his forthcoming book A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014). The article is attached below. To reserve lunch, rsvp to millercenter@umd.edu.
From 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Dr. Confino will also lead a graduate seminar in a discussion of his book Foundational Pasts. A copy of the book is available in the Miller Center office. This master class, a new undertaking by the Miller Center, is open to all graduate students. TLF 2108.
Dr. Confino is a Professor at the University of Virginia. He earned his BA from Tel Aviv University and PhD from UC Berkeley. He has authored three books, co-edited numerous volumes, and written over forty refereed articles, essays, and chapters. He has been awarded grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, and Lady Davis Foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. His book project "A World without Jews won a 2011 Guggenheim. His most recent book, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 2012) seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. Confino analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent, and foundational event in modern European history—the French Revolution. He is now at work on a history of 1948 in Palestine within global perspective of, among others, forced migrations and decolonization.
Related links:
Review by Jeremy D. Popkin in The Public Historian
Review by Richard Steigmann Gall