The Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies
2022
‘Refugees and gender studies: new perspectives in Holocaust studies.’ Prof. Marion Kaplan (New York University)
The University of Manchester Centre for Jewish Studies is pleased to announce that the eighth series of Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies will be given by Prof Marion Kaplan, Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. Prof. Kaplan is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her books: The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (Indiana, 2011).
Tues 8 February 2022- 6pm live online public lecture. 'Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945. Followed by public Q&A. This was a free online event.
The lecture, 'Hitler's Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-1945' depicts the travails of refugees escaping Nazi Europe and awaiting their fate in Portugal. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee existence, it highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness.
An emotional history of fleeing, Kaplan probes how specific locations touched refugees’ inner lives, including the borders they nervously crossed, the consulate lines they fretfully waited on, the smoky cafés they uneasily inhabited, or the overcrowded transatlantic ships that signalled their liberation. These sites induced feelings of frustration or relief – often both.
Weds 9 February 2022- 6pm live online lecture 'Gender and the Holocaust'
This lecture looked back to the beginnings of research on women and/or gender and the Holocaust. The talk described the first workshops that attempted to raise this question and the first books to offer some answers. Besides discussing how the field grew, it will focus on showing how a women’s and gender history perspective made a difference in understanding the Holocaust. It will raise women’s and men’s different perceptions and different reactions at home, in ghettoes, and in camps and it will look forward to new areas of research that also highlight women’s and gender studies.
Weds 9 Feb 2022, 3pm. Masterclass. For University of Manchester students and staff. Online zoom event.
The Bogdanow Lectures Bequest
This annual public lecture series has been made possible as a result of the generous bequest to the University by Fanni Bogdanow (1927-2013), a former Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Manchester and a child refugee on the Kindertransporte.
"Fanni Bogdanow was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. When she was 11, in 1939 and just in time, her parents loaded her on to a Kindertransport train bound for Britain. She was taken in by a Quaker family in Manchester to whom she remained very grateful. In 1945, she won a scholarship to study French at Manchester University; she was to stay at Manchester, as undergraduate, postgraduate, lecturer, reader and professor, for the rest of her life. Her parents, astonishingly, survived between them Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; to Fanni's intense joy, her mother later joined her in Manchester..." [More from The Guardian]
Fanni Bogdanow's full life story interview was conducted in April 2002 by one of the Centre's previous PhD students, Ros Livshin, and was archived at the Oral Testimony Archive of the Manchester Jewish Museum, a collection compiled under the supervison of the Centre's Bill Williams.
See also:
Fanni Bogdanow, 'Anne Frank and the Holocaust' in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 88:1 (2006), 207-215.
Fanni Bogdanow, 'From Holocaust Survivor to Arthurian Scholar' in On Arthurian Women, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 387-394.