<p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Lecture title: "History and Catastrophe: Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto"</p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">
Speaker: Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, CT</p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Date/Time: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 4pm (6th floor Herter Conference Room)</p>
<p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Description: In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to document and preserve the history of Jewish life in wartime Poland. As the Final Solution unfolded, the group persevered until the spring of 1943. Only three of its more than 60 members survived. Ringelblum and his family perished in March 1944, but not before he had managed to hide thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in 1946 and 1950.</p>
<p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Bio: Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a master of science from the London School of Economics. The author of numerous articles and scholarly talks in English, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish, Professor Kassow has lectured and taught in Mexico, Lithuania, Russia, and Poland. He is currently a lead consultant to the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw scheduled to open in 2012. His latest book, Who Will Write Our History: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, was published by Vintage in 2009.</p>
<p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "></p><p style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Sponsored by the National Yiddish Book Center with support from the Jack & Ruthe B. Cowl Center for Jewish Culture and the Righteous Persons Foundation and the Yiddish Language Club. Co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts History Department and English Department.</p>