Reactions in the Jewish Press

Chair: Marla Stone (Occidental College, Los Angeles, History)

• Anne-Christin Klotz (Freie Universität Berlin, Eastern European History)
  “The Warsaw Yiddish Press and the Persecution of Jews in the Third Reich. 1933-1938, A Comparative Analysis”

• Jeffrey Koerber (Chapman University, Los Angeles, History)
  “What Did Soviet Jews Make of Kristallnacht?”

• Kiril Feferman (Ariel University, Israel, History)
  “Public responses to Kristallnacht in Japan-controlled Harbin”

Jeff Koerber is an Assistant Professor of History at Chapman University in Orange, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Holocaust History from Clark University, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Illinois. Dr. Koerber has published widely on historic architecture and building preservation. His work on historic structures and sites has prompted his research into the relationships linking place, historical actors, and events. These inquiries form the basis of his research on the experiences of young Jews in the borderlands of the Soviet Union and Poland during the Holocaust. He has received fellowships from Claims Conference, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Holocaust Educational Foundation, Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and Fulbright.

Anne-Christin Klotz is a Ph.D. candidate at Freie Universität Berlin (Eastern European Institute), where she also received her B.A. in History and Jewish Studies and her M.A. in East European Studies. Before and during her studies she worked as a volunteer for the German NGO Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in the educational department at the memorial site Stutthof (Sztutowo, Poland) and as a junior research fellow in the document collection project The Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 at the Institute for Contemporary History, Berlin. Between 2015 and 2018 she was a research assistant at the Selma-Stern-Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, and she is currently a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies. She is writing her thesis on individual and collective reactions of Polish-Jewish journalists who wrote for the Yiddish daily press in Warsaw on the events in Nazi Germany from the moment of Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the following months.

Kiril Feferman is Senior Lecturer in Jewish Heritage at Ariel University in Israel. He is a member of the Yad Vashem Public Commission to Designate Righteous among the Nations, and has written extensively on the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet areas and World War II in the Soviet Union. His most recent book is The Holocaust in the Crimea and the Caucasus (Yad Vashem, 2016).