Ordinary Jews Resisting Nazi Persecution, with Wolf Gruner
ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: How did Wolf first discover that there were individual Jews who resisted Nazi persecution?
Wolf Gruner is a German academic who has been the Founding Director of the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation since 2014. He currently holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and is also Professor of History at USC. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Gruner is an internationally recognized expert on genocide and has published 10 books and numerous articles on the Holocaust in Europe as well as on mass violence against indigenous people in Latin America.
After more than a decade of research, he recently published his latest book, Resisters. How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany. Forgotten until now, between 1933 and 1945 many hundreds of Jewish women and men performed individual acts of resistance within Nazi Germany itself. Gruner presents many of their stories in this book on forgotten acts of individual defiance and protest of German and Austrian Jews in Nazi Germany.
While the book is well-researched and contains numerous references and notes, it is written is a very interesting non-academic style that will appeal to the general public, as well as to scholars.
(NOTE: This program is in commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on May 6th this year.)