After the Holocaust: The Global Impact and Cultural Significance of the Nazi Genocide of the Jews from 1945 to the Present
Wed. March 25, 20262:00 - 3:30 pm ET (US)
Hybrid on Zoom and In-Person
Lown 315, Brandeis University Campus
Co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
Refreshments will be provided for in-person attendees.
About the Event
The aftermath of the Holocaust has been long and wide-reaching. It has impacted every area of political and cultural life in many countries since 1945. What is the state of aftermath studies for the Holocaust? How do we periodize the post-Holocaust landscape? How, when and where has the Holocaust been globalized? How has it come to serve as a global cultural touchstone for evaluating mass violence? In what areas did the Holocaust generate a fundamental rethinking of human relations and state institutions? Join Sarah Cushman, Laura Jockusch, Devin Pendas, and Geffen Rosenthal for a conversation about how the history of the aftermath shapes Holocaust research and education.
About the Speakers
Sarah Cushman is Director of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and Senior Lecturer in the History Department. She earned her PhD from Clark University and previously served as Head of Educational Programming at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University and Director of Youth Education at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (New York). Cushman is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook on Auschwitz-Birkenau, co-editor in chief of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and co-editor of Cambridge Elements in Genocide Studies. Her first monograph, Women in Auschwitz, is under contract with Indiana University Press. Cushman is on the Executive Committee of the National Higher Education Leadership Consortium of Directors of Centers in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies and is a member of the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission.
Laura Jockusch is associate professor and holds the Albert Abramson Chair in Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. She wrote Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford UP 2012) and Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust: History, Memory and Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2026); she edited Khurbn-Forshung: Documents on Early Holocaust Research in Postwar Poland (Vandenhoeck 2022); and co-edited (with Gabriel Finder) Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (Wayne State UP 2015) and most recently with Devin Pendas, Cambridge History of the Holocaust, vol. IV Aftermath, Outcomes, Repercussions (Cambridge UP 2025).
Devin Pendas is professor of history at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has been a guest professor at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and at Meiji University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author or editor of several books, including most recently, Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945-1950 and the forthcoming Holocaust Historiography: A Critical Introduction.
Geffen Rosenthal is a Senior Program Associate on the Jewish Education Team at Facing History and Ourselves, providing professional development and coaching to educators in Jewish settings across the country. Additionally, she teaches 6th and 7th Grade at Temple Sinai in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she has been teaching for over ten years. Rosenthal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Brandeis University and a Master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from Boston University, where she published an original thesis titled “Birthing into Death: Stories of Jewish Pregnancy from the Holocaust.” She is also a third-year student on the virtual Rabbinic Pathway at Hebrew Union College and will (hopefully) be ordained as a Rabbi in Spring 2028. In her free time, she can be spotted walking her Black lab, Lemon.