Reactions in Jewish Communities

Chair: Paul Lerner (University of Southern California, History)

• Hasia Diner (New York University, American Jewish History)
  “1938: A Moment of Reckoning for American Jews”

• Steven Ross (University of Southern California, History)
  “The Ambiguous Legacy of Kristallnacht: Nazis, Resistors and Anti-Semitism in 1930s-1940s Los Angeles”

• Gershon Greenberg (American University, Washington, DC., Philosophy and Religion)
  “Orthodox Jewish Religious Responses to Kristallnacht: Globally Considered”

Steven J. Ross is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. His most recent book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History for 2018; it was also on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller List for 12 weeks. His previous book, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Film Scholars Award and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as a “Recommended Summer Readings” for 2012. Ross’ Op-Ed pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, International Herald-Tribune, Hollywood Reporter, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, and Politico. He has lectured throughout the U.S. as well as in London, Paris, Sydney, and Auckland.

Gershon Greenberg is Visiting Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he teaches graduate seminars and undergraduate classes on Musar, Hasidism, and Messianism during the catastrophe; and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University, Washington, D.C. He received his doctorate from the Joint Program in Religious Philosophy at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary in 1969. His primary field of research is Jewish religious thought through the Holocaust. Works include Mishpatekha tehom Rabbah: Teguvot hagutiot ortodoksiot lashoah, with Asaf Yedidyah (Jerusalem 2016) and Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses to the Holocaust, with Steven T. Katz (Oxford 2007). He has served as a Fellow at Yad Vashem’s Institute for Advanced Holocaust Scholarship; Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Study; and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University and Director of its Goldstein-Goren Center. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois-Chicago and her M.A. at the University of Chicago. A specialist in American Jewish and immigration history, she is the author of numerous books in these fields. Of particular relevance here, she authored The Jews of the United States: 1654-2000 (University of California Press) and We Remember with Reverence and Love: America Jews and the Myth of Silence After World War II. Among others, she has held a Fulbright fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Society of American Historians.