The 2027 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar (January 4-8, 2027) will introduce participants to the diverse writings that Jewish victims produced in real time as the catastrophic events of the Holocaust were still unfolding. Such materials—including diaries, letters, and literary texts—offer unique windows into the lived experiences and specific epistemological and ethical vantage points of Holocaust victims.
We will engage with both continuities and breaks between experience and reflection during the war years, on the one hand, and Holocaust memory and historiography as they emerged through decades of reflection and historical research, on the other. We will explore some of the clandestine archival projects to which we owe the survival of much Holocaust-era writing, including the Oyneg Shabes Archive led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the so-called Paper Brigade project, which subverted Nazi demands and clandestinely preserved Jewish cultural treasures in the Vilna Ghetto. The primary sources we will discuss (all available in English translation) span numerous languages and geographies of the Holocaust from western to eastern Europe. Together, we will address the following questions:
How did victims during the Holocaust perceive and experience their predicament?
What precedents, if any, did they see for what was occurring and how long did these remain viable reference points?
What resources in Jewish and European culture did victims mobilize—or rewrite and/or discard—as they tried to make sense of their terrifying and unresolved circumstances?
For whom did they write, and how do we read the voluminous and heterogeneous records they left?
In what ways does engagement with victims’ voices open up for students new ways of approaching the study of the Holocaust?
The 2027 Hess Seminar is designed to help faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD candidates currently teaching or preparing to teach courses relating to the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to: Anthropology, Communication, Cultural Studies, Digital History, Disability Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Literature, Museum Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theology and Religious Studies, and World Languages and Cultures. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, the seminar aims to provide faculty with new approaches for integrating diaries, literary texts, and letters that victims produced during the Holocaust into college-level curricula.
Seminar Facilitators:
Alexandra Garbarini, Hans W. Gatzke '38 Professor of Modern European History, Williams College
Alexandra Garbarini’s research brings together the history of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence; the interdisciplinary study of autobiographical sources, specifically, testimony, diaries and letters; and the history of historiography. She is the author of Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2006; National Jewish Book Award runner-up), and co-author of Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938-1940 (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011). In addition to articles and reviews, she has co-edited two volumes: with Boris Adjemian, a special issue of the journal Etudes Arméniennes Contemporaines on “Victim Testimony and Mass Violence” (2015), and with Paul Jaskot, Lessons and Legacies, Volume XIII, New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (Northwestern University Press, 2018). She and Jean-Marc Dreyfus prepared editions of the Holocaust diary of Lucien Dreyfus in French (Le Manuscrit, 2018) and English (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021). Her recent scholarship explores the role of victim testimony to mass violence and genocide from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust. Garbarini serves on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Sven-Erik Rose, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis
Sven-Erik Rose’s teaching and research focus on literature and intellectual history by European Jewish authors writing in German, French, and Yiddish. His articles within the field of Holocaust Studies treat topics including French-language Holocaust novels by Piotr Rawicz and Patrick Modiano; writings from Nazi ghettos grappling with the experience of hunger; and the Cold War reception of the clandestine Warsaw Ghetto archive “Oyneg Shabes.” With David Bathrick, he co-edited an issue of New German Critique exploring “Ambivalent Sites of Memory in Postwar Germany,” and with Jennifer Geddes he is the co-editor of Lessons and Legacies XVII: Languages of the Holocaust, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. His book Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2025) is the first monograph devoted entirely to literary writing by inmates of these Nazi ghettos. His current book project examines Holocaust victims’ real-time reflections on the precarious status of ethical frameworks in the face of the extreme violence and, ultimately, genocide they were witnessing. One portion of this study, “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn,” is forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Rose also contributed the chapter “Literary Writing in Extremis in Nazi Ghettos in Poland” to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature.
Application Details:
Seminar applicants can be at any career stage but must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America, including colleges, universities, and community colleges. Applications must include: (1) a curriculum vitae; (2) a one- to two-page statement outlining how the seminar will strengthen the candidate’s teaching in the areas of Holocaust studies, oral history methods, or other related fields (required components are outlined below); (3) a draft syllabus with content relating to the Hess Seminar topic that the candidate has taught or anticipates teaching.
In your statement of interest, please address the following:
How the seminar would augment or impact the course(s) you anticipate teaching
How the seminar would help meet your institution's needs and/or expand your institution’s curricular offerings
How your scholarly perspective, teaching experiences, and/or disciplinary approach would enhance the seminar discussions
This seminar aims to convene scholars from various career levels, disciplines, regional locations, academic institutions, and backgrounds. Participants must commit to attending the entire seminar. All assigned readings and course materials will be made available to participants in advance of the program. After the conclusion of the seminar, participants are expected to submit a preliminary version of a revised syllabus. The seminar will include designated working sessions for participants to revise and expand their syllabi content using Museum resources.
Travel and Lodging: For non-local participants, the Mandel Center will cover the cost of (1) direct, economy travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and (2) lodging for the duration of the seminar. All participants will be provided $250 to defray the cost of meals and incidentals.
Deadline: Applications must be received electronically no later than Tuesday, October 20, 2026. The application form is available online here. Applications from all qualified individuals will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or any other protected status. Please contact campusoutreach@ushmm.org with any questions.
This seminar is endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice.
2027 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar: Jewish Perspectives in Real Time During the Holocaust
The 2027 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar (January 4-8, 2027) will introduce participants to the diverse writings that Jewish victims produced in real time as the catastrophic events of the Holocaust were still unfolding. Such materials—including diaries, letters, and literary texts—offer unique windows into the lived experiences and specific epistemological and ethical vantage points of Holocaust victims.
We will engage with both continuities and breaks between experience and reflection during the war years, on the one hand, and Holocaust memory and historiography as they emerged through decades of reflection and historical research, on the other. We will explore some of the clandestine archival projects to which we owe the survival of much Holocaust-era writing, including the Oyneg Shabes Archive led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the so-called Paper Brigade project, which subverted Nazi demands and clandestinely preserved Jewish cultural treasures in the Vilna Ghetto. The primary sources we will discuss (all available in English translation) span numerous languages and geographies of the Holocaust from western to eastern Europe. Together, we will address the following questions:
How did victims during the Holocaust perceive and experience their predicament?
What precedents, if any, did they see for what was occurring and how long did these remain viable reference points?
What resources in Jewish and European culture did victims mobilize—or rewrite and/or discard—as they tried to make sense of their terrifying and unresolved circumstances?
For whom did they write, and how do we read the voluminous and heterogeneous records they left?
In what ways does engagement with victims’ voices open up for students new ways of approaching the study of the Holocaust?
The 2027 Hess Seminar is designed to help faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD candidates currently teaching or preparing to teach courses relating to the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to: Anthropology, Communication, Cultural Studies, Digital History, Disability Studies, Film and Media Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, Literature, Museum Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, Theology and Religious Studies, and World Languages and Cultures. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, the seminar aims to provide faculty with new approaches for integrating diaries, literary texts, and letters that victims produced during the Holocaust into college-level curricula.
Seminar Facilitators:
Alexandra Garbarini, Hans W. Gatzke '38 Professor of Modern European History, Williams College
Alexandra Garbarini’s research brings together the history of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence; the interdisciplinary study of autobiographical sources, specifically, testimony, diaries and letters; and the history of historiography. She is the author of Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2006; National Jewish Book Award runner-up), and co-author of Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938-1940 (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2011). In addition to articles and reviews, she has co-edited two volumes: with Boris Adjemian, a special issue of the journal Etudes Arméniennes Contemporaines on “Victim Testimony and Mass Violence” (2015), and with Paul Jaskot, Lessons and Legacies, Volume XIII, New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (Northwestern University Press, 2018). She and Jean-Marc Dreyfus prepared editions of the Holocaust diary of Lucien Dreyfus in French (Le Manuscrit, 2018) and English (Rowman & Littlefield, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021). Her recent scholarship explores the role of victim testimony to mass violence and genocide from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust. Garbarini serves on the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
Sven-Erik Rose, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis
Sven-Erik Rose’s teaching and research focus on literature and intellectual history by European Jewish authors writing in German, French, and Yiddish. His articles within the field of Holocaust Studies treat topics including French-language Holocaust novels by Piotr Rawicz and Patrick Modiano; writings from Nazi ghettos grappling with the experience of hunger; and the Cold War reception of the clandestine Warsaw Ghetto archive “Oyneg Shabes.” With David Bathrick, he co-edited an issue of New German Critique exploring “Ambivalent Sites of Memory in Postwar Germany,” and with Jennifer Geddes he is the co-editor of Lessons and Legacies XVII: Languages of the Holocaust, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. His book Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2025) is the first monograph devoted entirely to literary writing by inmates of these Nazi ghettos. His current book project examines Holocaust victims’ real-time reflections on the precarious status of ethical frameworks in the face of the extreme violence and, ultimately, genocide they were witnessing. One portion of this study, “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn,” is forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Rose also contributed the chapter “Literary Writing in Extremis in Nazi Ghettos in Poland” to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature.
Application Details:
Seminar applicants can be at any career stage but must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America, including colleges, universities, and community colleges. Applications must include: (1) a curriculum vitae; (2) a one- to two-page statement outlining how the seminar will strengthen the candidate’s teaching in the areas of Holocaust studies, oral history methods, or other related fields (required components are outlined below); (3) a draft syllabus with content relating to the Hess Seminar topic that the candidate has taught or anticipates teaching.
In your statement of interest, please address the following:
How the seminar would augment or impact the course(s) you anticipate teaching
How the seminar would help meet your institution's needs and/or expand your institution’s curricular offerings
How your scholarly perspective, teaching experiences, and/or disciplinary approach would enhance the seminar discussions
This seminar aims to convene scholars from various career levels, disciplines, regional locations, academic institutions, and backgrounds. Participants must commit to attending the entire seminar. All assigned readings and course materials will be made available to participants in advance of the program. After the conclusion of the seminar, participants are expected to submit a preliminary version of a revised syllabus. The seminar will include designated working sessions for participants to revise and expand their syllabi content using Museum resources.
Travel and Lodging: For non-local participants, the Mandel Center will cover the cost of (1) direct, economy travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and (2) lodging for the duration of the seminar. All participants will be provided $250 to defray the cost of meals and incidentals.
Deadline: Applications must be received electronically no later than Tuesday, October 20, 2026. The application form is available online here. Applications from all qualified individuals will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or any other protected status. Please contact campusoutreach@ushmm.org with any questions.
This seminar is endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice.