October 5–7, 2026 and July 26–30, 2027 Application deadline: Friday, July 17, 2026
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum invites applications for the Moskowitz/Rafalowicz International Research Workshop Global Geographies of the Holocaust: Mapping Jewish Refugee Resettlement. The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Sandra Gruner-Domic and Pragya Kaul Guido in cooperation with NYU Washington, DC. Anne Kelly Knowles, the 2026-27 Ina Levine Invitational Scholar, will serve as an advisor to the workshop participants. The workshop will meet in two sessions in Washington, DC, and will include research and convenings at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and NYU Washington, DC. The first session will be held October 5–7, 2026 and the second July 26–30, 2027.
In recent years, the terrain of Holocaust studies has shifted to encompass experiences of Jewish flight and rescue across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Despite this "remapping" of the Holocaust (Grossmann 2012), there remains a critical gap in the tools available to researchers and educators: a mechanism to document, analyze, and visualize the scale and scope of Holocaust migration.
How, then, do we represent a Holocaust that was global in scope? How might we encourage scholars and educators to think about the Holocaust and its legacies beyond Europe? And how can research on Holocaust refugees be made accessible to broader audiences?
This workshop is the first step toward a larger, public-facing project designed to address these questions. At its center is the design of a durable, open access dataset to support mapping and visualization projects on the global geography of Holocaust refugee resettlement. The workshop will focus on building the conceptual, methodological, and evidentiary foundations for this resource.
The workshop will bring together participants whose research addresses resettlement projects—both proposed and realized—for Jewish refugee relief from Hitler’s Europe between 1933 and 1945. We are as interested in outlining the visions for Jewish relief and rescue, including ambitious proposals from private citizens and officially sponsored studies, as we are in exploring the circumstances of their realization or failure. Together, we seek to visualize the contours of the Holocaust as a phenomenon of global reach and consequence.
Through presentations and discussions, the workshop will address several core questions. Who were the main official and unofficial actors facilitating Jewish resettlement before and during World War II? What criteria existed for Jewish resettlement in different parts of the world, and what made certain proposals successful while others failed? What would the ideal political geography of a global map of the Holocaust look like? What can refugee-driven histories tell us about Europe’s place in the world, the horizons of the era’s geopolitical imagination, and the global legacies of the Holocaust?
Workshop Structure
The workshop will convene for its first session from October 5–7, 2026, as a collaborative design forum. Participants will collectively establish the project’s conceptual contours and the core structure of its dataset, including the categories, sources, interpretive frameworks, and metadata needed to document Holocaust refugee resettlement projects on a global scale.
The second session, scheduled for July 26–30, 2027, will focus on refining the structure of the dataset and discussing next steps for this project. During this session, participants will also conduct research in the Museum’s collections and other archives in the Washington, DC area and test the dataset’s categories against archival materials and case studies.
Scope and Methods
This workshop welcomes contributions from scholars whose research engages with the relationship between the Holocaust and global migration. We are particularly interested in applicants with transnational or regional expertise who are interested in visualizing research through mapping, database design, spatial analysis, or other digital methods. Prior experience with digital humanities or mapping is welcome but not required.
We invite applications that address themes including, but not limited to:
Case studies of resettlement projects and their outcomes, especially from overlooked regions
Comparative approaches to Jewish resettlement across different nations, empires, and communities
The political, legal, and social justifications for resettlement plans
Individuals, institutions, or groups coordinating, administering, or financing resettlement
Successful, unsuccessful, proposed, speculative, or abandoned plans for refugee resettlement
The intersections of Holocaust refugee resettlement with other refugee movements
Local community responses to resettlement proposals and outcomes
The legacies of Holocaust refugee resettlement on international or regional refugee regimes
Participants will work toward laying the groundwork for the broader digital initiative by:
Outlining criteria for generating detailed profiles about migration or settlement spaces
Identifying the strategies, networks, and tools used by Jewish refugees and their advocates to facilitate group rescue
Developing shared categories for documenting proposed and realized resettlement projects
Designing a dataset of primary and secondary sources to inform the broader project
Museum Resources
The Museum's David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation houses an unparalleled repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The Museum’s comprehensive collection contains millions of documents, photos, films, books, and testimonies. Among these holdings are extensive collections documenting the global trajectories of Jewish refugees and the many efforts to facilitate their relief, rescue, and resettlement between 1933 and 1945. The Museum holds records of major transnational humanitarian, Jewish, and intergovernmental organizations, including bulletins, circulars, reports, correspondence, and case files that reveal how agencies identified possible destinations, raised funds, negotiated with governments, coordinated transport, and managed refugee casework. The Museum’s government, diplomatic, and consular holdings—including records from colonial and territorial administration archives—illuminate the bureaucratic and political calculus of refugee resettlement. These materials document how states defined admissibility, issued or denied visas, and monitored refugees, balancing humanitarian claims against security, labor, racial, and political concerns. They also capture how officials on the ground assessed land, climate, and labor conditions and weighed the broader societal implications of admitting European Jewish refugees. These institutional sources are complemented by the papers, correspondence, photographs, memoirs, and testimonies of rescue workers, relief agents, and refugees, as well as records of Jewish communities that received refugees in the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific. Together, these materials illuminate the ambitions, constraints, and lived realities of Jewish resettlement projects, offering significant opportunities to map the global reach of the Holocaust.
Participants will have access to the Museum’s downtown campus and the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in Bowie, MD, as well as other archival institutions in the Washington, DC area.
To Apply
Applications are welcome from scholars in any relevant academic discipline, including but not limited to anthropology, geography, Jewish studies, history, sociology, and political science. The Mandel Center will reimburse the costs of round-trip economy-class air tickets to/from the Washington, DC metro area and provide hotel accommodation for the duration of both sessions of the workshop. Participants are required to attend the full duration of both sessions of the workshop and to submit a brief on their existing data and maps, regional research gaps, and proposed database categories in advance of the program.
The deadline for receipt of applications is July 10, 2026. Applications must include:
A short biography
A curriculum vitae
A list of any related publications and/or on-going research projects
A project description of no more than 500 words that elaborates the core spatial research question(s) you seek to answer using geographic data
A sample of your source material
Applications must be submitted in English via our online application. Questions should be directed to researchworkshops@ushmm.org.
Admission will be determined without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender (sexual orientation or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or reprisal. The Museum also prohibits any form of workplace discrimination or harassment.
This workshop has been made possible through the generosity of the Moskowitz/Rafalowicz Endowment at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and NYU Washington, DC.