Beyond Broken Glass: A Gendered Perspective on the November Pogrom

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Salem State University is honored to partner with the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College to host Prof. Marion Kaplan. In her lecture, Kaplan will offer an overview of Nazi policy toward Jews in the years leading up to the November Pogrom (commonly known as Kristallnacht), approached from a social history perspective that focuses on events at the grassroots level. Her talk also adopts a gendered lens, exploring how men and women experienced the antisemitic onslaught in both similar and different ways. The lecture will examine the course of the pogrom itself, highlighting how violence and persecution were shaped by gender, and will consider the courage shown by women who sought to secure the release of their sons, husbands, and fathers from concentration camps.

Speaker Bio: Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor emerita of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991), Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998), and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore, 2011) as well as a finalist for Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua (2008). Her other monographs include: The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945 (ed.). She has also edited several books on German-Jewish and women’s history and has taught courses on German-Jewish history, European women’s history, German and European history, as well as European Jewish history, and Jewish women’s history. Her newest book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45 was published by Yale University Press in 2020.

This lecture is hosted by the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College and co-sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Salem State University and the Holocaust and Genocide Center at Bristol Community College.