The Hugo Valentin Lecture 2014: Professor Dan Michman

Beyond “Good and Bad”: A Corrective Analysis of the Phenomenon of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi Era
The Twelfth Hugo Valentin Lecture was given by Professor Dan Michman, Bar-Ilan University and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, on Thursday, March 6, 2014.

The Twelfth Annual Hugo Valentin Lecture will be given by Professor Dan Michman, professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. One of Israel’s most prominent Holocaust historians, Michman holds the chair of Bar-Ilan’s Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, and is also director, and John Najmann Chair of Yad Vashem’s International Institute of Holocaust Research, Jerusalem.

Professor Michman has published extensively on a wide range of subjects within both Holocaust history and memory. His most recent monograph is The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press 2011), a study that argues for a significant reinterpretation of long-held understandings of the role and rationality of the Jewish ghettos – formed within Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

In his lecture, Michman will discuss a subject intimately connected to the ghettos: the infamous Jewish Councils (Judenräte) that were the imposed governing bodies of Jewish ghettos and communities. These groups constituted one of the most controversial aspects of Nazi occupation policy, and have been the subject of intense and often emotional debate ever since. The lecture focusses on the establishment and implementation of the councils and how they evolved in different communities throughout Europe and even North Africa, and discusses in whose interest the councils and significant elements of them were effected.

This year's Hugo Valentin Lecture will take place in Auditorium Minus, Museum Gustavianum (Akademigatan 3, Uppsala) at 17:00, on Thursday, March 6.

The evening will be opened by Deputy Vice-Chancellor Anders Malmberg and Associate Professor Paul A. Levine, who will introduce this evening's speaker.

The lecture is held with support from the Vice Chancellor's office and the Wenner-Gren Foundations