Holocaust Scholarship ─ Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations

This collection of essays arises from a conference held at the University of Cape Town under the auspices of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research. Leading international Holocaust scholars met to reflect on the ways their personal experiences influenced their professional trajectories over many decades of immersion in studies of the Holocaust. Participants examined changes and developments in the field within the context of their own personal odysseys, including shifting cultural milieus and robust academic conflicts. Meeting in South Africa provided a special ambience as the country had emerged only two decades earlier from a race-based system defined by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. The massive corpus of scholarly engagement with the Holocaust - with reverberations across the globe - has ensured that its study today is paradigmatic for scholars exploring genocide, as well as perpetrators and victims of antisemitism, racism, and the Second World War.

Christopher Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA before his retirement in May 2014. He is the author of eight books, including Ordinary Men, The Origins of the Final Solution, and Remembering Survival.

Susannah Heschel is Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, USA and the author of Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Currently a Guggenheim Fellow, she is writing a book on the history of Jewish scholarship on Islam.

Michael Marrus is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of eight books: among them, Vichy France and the Jews (with Robert O. Paxton), The Holocaust in History and Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s.

Milton Shain is Isidore and Theresa Cohen Professor of Jewish Civilisation in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he is also Director of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research.