The Central European University

Jewish Studies Program

cordially invites you to a lecture by

Zvi Gitelman

University of Michigan

Resistance, Rationality and Morality: Should Jews Have Resisted the Nazis?

Few admit this, but many Jews and Israelis were profoundly embarrassed by the Holocaust. It seemed to demonstrate fatal weakness and an inability or unwillingness to fight. Some non-Jews had the same impression. Without presuming to judge the issue, this talk probes the moral ambiguities of physical resistance to Nazi oppression. Moreover, “rational choice” theory persuades us that it was also irrational. I probe the many motivations for physical resistance, the types of resistance offered, and the complexities and ambiguities they presented, making an “impossible” situation even “more impossible.”

Tuesday, March 3 at 6 p.m.

In Gellner Room, Monument Building

Zvi Gitelman is professor of political science and Preston Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author or editor of 16 books, in 2012 Gitelman published Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: an Uncertain Ethnicity (Cambridge University Press), based on several thousand interviews. His book A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union (2001) has been translated into Japanese and Russian. His current research is on World War Two and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. A forthcoming edited volume is The Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora (Rutgers University Press, 2016). Gitelman has served on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and as director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, both at the University of Michigan. 

A reception will follow