Campus Outreach Lecture Program

The Campus Outreach Lecture Program (COLP) provides college and university communities with a better understanding of the history, lessons, and contemporary relevance of the Holocaust. Speakers are drawn from the Mandel Center’s staff and current and former visiting fellows from around the world. COLPs are an invaluable resource for colleges and universities seeking to enhance Holocaust education and for communities concerned about the ongoing danger of discrimination, antisemitism, and Holocaust denial.

Lectures

An overview of possible COLP topics can be found below. To request a lecture program on one of the following interdisciplinary topics, please complete the request form. We strongly encourage requests for lectures that serve more than one campus community or more than one classroom on a single campus through a collaborative approach between instructors.

The Campus Outreach division also offers short (20–30 minute) recorded lectures and discussion for a variety of hybrid learning environments. The recordings feature Mandel Center staff experts and renowned scholars from Holocaust Studies and beyond, who discuss carefully selected primary sources available in the Museum’s collection. Each recorded lecture/discussion corresponds to one of the interdisciplinary topics that Campus Outreach regularly offers (please see below). This page will be updated with new recorded lectures as they become available.

Lecture Topics

• Examining America’s Response to the Holocaust: Experts focus on critical questions relating to the Museum’s current exhibit, Americans and the Holocaust, including: How was the refugee crisis of the 1930s and 1940s understood? What did Americans from various socioeconomic classes, age groups, and locations know and understand about the threats posed by Nazi Germany?

  • The Oscars and the Holocaust with Dr. Edna Friedberg and Dr. Steven Luckert  

• Legacies of Empire: Science, Race, Eugenics, and Genocide: Experts situate the Holocaust in the larger framework of the history of European empires, “scientific racism,” eugenics policies, and racial cleansing that occurred in Europe and around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  • A History of Eugenics with Dr. Lutz Kaelber and Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice

• Jewish Responses to the Holocaust: Experts introduce the history of the persecution of Jews as the largest victim group during the Holocaust, as well as Jewish responses to the Holocaust and its aftermath.

  • Holocaust Diaries with Professor Alexandra Garbarini, Williams College ​

• Marginalized Voices and Understudied Groups in Holocaust Studies: Experts introduce understudied groups that the Nazis systematically persecuted before and during World War II. Lecture topics include the persecution of the Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, and Soviet prisoners of war.

• Gender and Sexuality in the Holocaust: Experts discuss the intersection of sexual violence and genocide, as well as queer history, women’s studies, and masculinity during the Holocaust.

  • ​Pride Month: The Nazi Persecution of Gay People with Dr. Edna Friedberg and Dr. Jake Newsome ​

• Antisemitism, Nazism, and the Holocaust: Experts provide an overview of the long history of antisemitism in Europe and beyond, using the Holocaust as a focal point for examining reoccurring tropes in literature, film, and media representation.

  • ​Antisemitism: Here and Now with Dr. Edna Friedberg and Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory University ​

• The Holocaust in Visual Culture: Experts introduce cultural representations—including film, photography, and other media sources—to discuss everyday life in Europe’s ghettos, as well as trauma and atrocity during the Holocaust.

  • ​Holocaust Photographs with Professor Daniel Magilow, University of Tennesee, Knoxville ​

• Violence and Racial “Othering” in the Contexts of Nazi Germany and US History:  Experts facilitate dialogue about the similarities, differences, and gray areas between Nazi Germany and systems of targeted oppression in the United States, such as the apartheid regime of the Jim Crow South, the long-standing policies towards Native Americans, and other historical cases of race-based persecution. 

• The Holocaust and Questions of Citizenship, Refugees, and Displaced Peoples: Scholars introduce topics relating to citizenship, refugees, and displaced persons in the lead up to and during World War II, as well as the less-well known history of everyday life in Europe’s displaced person camps after the war’s end.

• Memory and Memorialization of the Holocaust: Scholars address the various ways in which the victims of the Holocaust have been remembered and memorialized since 1945. In addition, they discuss the controversies and debates surrounding certain memorial projects.

  • ​New Discoveries from the Film Shoah with Dr. Edna Friedberg and film archivist Lindsay Zarwell ​

• Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust: Experts explore the history of the churches' response to the Holocaust and the ways in which religious institutions, leaders, and theologians have addressed this history and its legacy since 1945. (For more information on Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust please click here.)

  • ​Courageous Acts Inspired by Faith with Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand

  • The Danger of Indifference: "Then They Came For Me" with Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming

For more information, please contact Dr. Katharine White at kwhite@ushmm.org.