Conference Announcement: American Responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives, June 15-17, 2011

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2011

Conference Announcement: American Responses to the Holocaust: Transatlantic Perspectives, June 15-17, 2011, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands, and Institute of Jewish Studies, Antwerp University, Belgium.

Victoria J. Barnett, U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

This year’s Conference of the Netherlands American Studies Association and Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association is being held in cooperation with the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. This conference aims to explore American responses to the Holocaust and the ways in which the systematic destruction of European Jewry during World War II has figured in American politics, in important cultural and social debates in the United States, in American literature and popular culture, and in other aspects of American life, such as religion, education, and jurisprudence.

The conference will include six excellent keynote speakers and 33 speakers from 11 different countries who offer multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. American Responses to the Holocaust will bring a new American Studies perspective to what has traditionally been the focus of Jewish Studies and Holocaust studies. The organizers have selected many papers that explore responses to the Holocaust from a transatlantic perspective in the belief that a comparative approach that takes into account the similarities and differences between responses in Europe and the United States is useful and enlightening for American studies scholars and can contribute new and valuable insights into the ways in which the Holocaust has figured in American life.

Keynote speakers include David Cesarani (Royal Holloway College, University of London), Dan Diner (Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, University of Leipzig and Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Hasia Diner (Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, New York University), Deborah Dwork (Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University), Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University), and Herman Van Goethem (Antwerp University and Museum on Holocaust and Human Rights, Mechelen, Belgium).

For more information on the conference, including the full program, see http://www.roosevelt.nl/smartsite.dws?ch=rsc&id=29408.