EVENT UPDATE – Dr. Newman has had to cancel his visit to Seattle. The Ellison Center is working on rescheduling this lecture for another time. 

[title size=”1″ content_align=”left” style_type=”single solid” sep_color=”” class=”” id=””]An Overview of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union[/title]

This talk discusses the experiences of Holocaust victims who lived inside the borders of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the German invasion on June 22, 1941, through the Red Army’s victory, and to the divisiveness over the post-war memory of the events of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. The scope of this subject is expansive in terms of the physical territory covered, the destruction of human life wrought by a variety of perpetrators, and the political factors affecting the remembrance of the Holocaust. Though exact figures will likely never be determined, leading historians currently believe that between 1.5 and close to 3 million Soviet Jews lost their lives during the occupation. Regrettably, the memory of their destruction has proven a contentious issue throughout the Soviet period and to the present day, with various political considerations and (some would argue) anti-Semitic agendas relegating the story of the Jews during the Holocaust as a byline at best, and completely absent from the historical record at worst. Today’s talk will provide an overview of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and explain why it is so important that we understand and continue to study this horrific tragedy both in the context of Holocaust history and in assessing the state of international politics and conflict in the contemporary space of the former Soviet Union.

For more information about this event, please check out the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies.

Daniel Newman is the Program Manager of the Initiative for the Study of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He holds a PhD in modern European history from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he completed a dissertation entitled “Criminal Strategies and Institutional Concerns in the Soviet Legal System: An Analysis of Criminal Appeals in Moscow Province, 1921-1928.” His research interests include Russian and Soviet history, comparative legal history, and the history of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. He has presented his work at international scholarly conferences hosted by the Department of State, the Kennan Institute, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the German Historical Institute, and the Franco-Russian Center for Research in Human and Social Sciences. His most recent work was published in The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review. He has received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and a Hans Rogger Fellowship in Russian history, has translated children’s stories from Russian to English for publication, and has taught at Loyola Marymount University.