The Jack Abel Lecture in Antisemitism with Claire Zalc

The lecture presents a collective biography of Jewish Siblings from the Polish town of Lubartów from the early 1920s through the 1950s. The five siblings traverse the globe in an attempt to evade antisemitism. Their journeys take them to various locations, including Germany, England, France, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Auschwitz concentration camp. Some of them survived the Holocaust, while others were murdered. By combining a transnational perspective with a microhistorical methodology, this lecture addresses the relations between migrations and persecution.

It aims to examine the role of kinship, local and transnational ties, and relational resources in the fate of individuals facing antisemitism. Who fled? When and where? With whom? Who survived, and who did not? This also broaches the question of “who knew what” among the victims by studying how information circulated among them. What opportunities do individuals have to circumvent, escape, or survive? The objective is to comprehend the dynamics of a collective that has undergone significant disruption and extreme violence.
Claire Zalc is Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, France) and a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, France). She has written on topics such as business and entrepreneurship, immigration in France, and the history of persecution during the Vichy regime. Her research focuses on the relationship between the history of migration and the Holocaust. She received the CNRS Medal Bronze in 2013.

She is the author of several books, such as Microhistories of the Holocaust (ed. with Bruttmann), New York, Berghahn Books, 2016 and Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, Harvard University Press, 2020, for which she was awarded the 2016 Malesherbes History of Justice Book Prize and honorable mention for the 2022 Eugen Weber Book Prize.

She is currently the Principal Investigator of the ERC LUBARTWORLD project “Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s)” and the Ina Levine Senior Scholar-in-Residence (2024-2025) of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Supported by the generosity of the Abel and Kaye families.

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Host or Publisher The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University