The three-day “In Global Transit: Forced Migration of Jews and Other Refugees (1940s – 1960s)” conference convened more than 30 experts from Germany, Great Britain, India, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and the United States to present new research on the migration of Jews and other refugees between the 1940s and 1960s. The conference was organized by Wolf Gruner (USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Los Angeles), Simone Lässig (German Historical Institute Washington DC), Francesco Spagnolo (The Magnes, UC Berkeley), Swen Steinberg (Queen’s University, Kingston).

The presentations touched on migration topics as illegal borders crossing, state restrictions, citizenship, racism, and individual Jewish experiences in countries, like Brasil, Kenya, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Columbia. In addition to nine panels, the conference featured a keynote address by Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State University), an excursion to Chinatown in San Francisco, and an introduction to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Family Life at the University of California at Berkeley, which is a collection of artifacts and art as product of Jewish migration. The conference included presentations by four members of the Center’s 2017-2019 Interdisciplinary Research Week team, as well as by 2018-2019 Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Kimberly Cheng.

Read the conference program and report here.

This is the second of three brief summaries about the conferences co-organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2019.