Stay in Touch with HGI on Social Media!

Calendar of Events

Previous events

Please register here for Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMldu-hpzsoHdRk-Nq3UNqkiEAMqrCeVj_O

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMldu-hpzsoHdRk-Nq3UNqkiEAMqrCeVj_O

Wolf Gruner, Ph.D., discusses the subject of his book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany (Yale University Press, 2023), which features the life stories of five Jewish men and women who resisted in different ways against persecution in Nazi Germany. By discussing their courageous acts, the book demonstrates the wide range of Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany, challenges the myth of Jewish passivity and illuminates individual Jewish agency during the Holocaust.

Wolf Gruner, Ph.D., holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his Ph.D. in History from the Technical University Berlin and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women's Christian University Tokyo, among others. Gruner is the author of o books on the Holocaust, including Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims. His 2016 prizewinning German book was published in English as The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. He co-edited four books, including Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust and New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison. He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research, among others.

Azeem Ibrahim's compelling lecture delves into the root causes and motivations of the harrowing Rohingya genocide, shedding light on the historical context, human rights violations, and geopolitical complexities surrounding this tragic crisis.

Azeem Ibrahim, Ph.D., is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, and a director at the Center for Global Policy in Washington, D.C. Over the years, he has advised numerous world leaders on strategy and policy development. Ibrahim is also the author of the seminal books Rohingya: Inside Myanmar's Genocide (Hurst, 2016) and Radical Origins: Why We are Losing the Battle against Islamic Extremism (Pegasus, 2017). He is a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine and his writing has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Times (UK), Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and many others. Outside academia, Ibrahim has been a reservist in the IV Battalion Parachute Regiment and an award-winning entrepreneur. He was ranked as a Top 100 Global Thinker by the European Social Think Tank and named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, after which he completed fellowships at Oxford and Harvard. In 2019, he received the International Association of Genocide Scholars Engaged Scholar Prize for his research on the Rohingya genocide. In 2022, Ibrahim was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I, on the recommendation of the prime minister, for his services to foreign policy.

Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia

Kelly Commons 5C and Zoom

By 2016, xenophobia resurged internationally. Psychiatrist and historian George Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamities that culminated in the Holocaust, followed by its sudden reappearance in the 21st century. Synthesizing history, philosophy and psychology, Makari offers insights into ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the Other and institutional bias. In the end, he seeks to offer a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups, leading to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.

George Makari, M.D., is director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is guest professor at Rockefeller University and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. His book, Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award.

He is also the author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, a 2015 Guardian Best Book of the Year. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Boston Globe. He is a graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.

To attend virtually, register for the zoom by clicking on the location above.

Newsletter sign up

Stay current with HGI Manhattan College