The educational opportunities made possible by The Lowe Family Holocaust and Genocide Education Endowment are designed to foster understanding, and to disseminate knowledge, about the causes and conditions that foster genocides, including the Holocaust and to generate public awareness about the danger of authoritarian, totalitarian and nationalistic regimes to the future of humanity.
The 2022 Lowe Family Research Conference is currently being planned and will be announced in Fall 2021.
Previous Lowe Events
2021
January 25, 2021
The Lowe Family Research Workshop
Anti-Semitism in Comparative Perspective: Recent Trends and Research Frontiers
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the growth of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world. New research estimates more than a quarter of the world—1.09 billion people out of more than 4.1 billion people surveyed—harbors anti-Semitic attitudes. This workshop—organized by David Siroky and Lenka Bustikova of the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University—brings together leading scholars from around the globe to discuss the frontiers in the study of anti-Semitism and to debate critical factors that influence where and when ethnoreligious groups, and Jews in particular, are likely to be targeted and viewed with prejudice.
2020
February 17, 2020
Lowe Family Lecture
Anti-Semitism, Fascism and Populism
Federico Finchelstein
The New School for Social Research
Addressing the historical relationship between fascism and populism with a special focus on their similarities and differences vis-a-vis racism and antisemitism. If fascism (in countries like Germany and Italy) arrived to power by democratic means and then destroyed democracy from within and created extreme racist dictatorships; early post war-populists Latin American populists, like Getulio Vargas in Brazil and Peronism Argentina, were dictators that renounced dictatorships and racism, creating new populist democracies. This used to be a key distinction between populism and racism. And yet, in the new populism of the extreme right racism has returned making them closer to fascism than ever before.
Federico Finchelstein is Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. He has taught at the History Department of Brown University and he received his PhD at Cornell University. He is Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at NSSR, and the author of numerous books on fascism, populism, Dirty Wars, the Holocaust and Jewish history in Latin America and Europe. His books have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Hungarian, Korean and Turkish.
2019
March 18, 2019
Lowe Family Lecture
Refuseniks & Rights Defenders: Jews & the Soviet Dissident Movement
Benjamin Nathans
University of Pennsylvania
The exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union transformed the Jewish landscape on three continents and has been called the preeminent case of Jewish human rights activism. It is often identified — and confused — with the Soviet dissident movement and the struggle for rights in Russia. What brought the two movements together — and what kept them apart? This talk explores the ideas, the people, and the politics that animated the most consequential forms of resistance to the 20th century’s longest-lived experiment in totalitarian rule, and their consequences for the world today.
Benjamin Nathans is associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in modern Russia, the Soviet Union, modern Jewish history, and the history of human rights. His multiple prizewinning book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia has been translated into Hebrew and Russian. He is currently completing a work titled To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: A History of the Soviet Dissident Movement, and a co-edited volume, From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages.
2018
November 1, 2018
Lowe Family Lecture
The Life and Death of the Russian Revolution
Yuri Slezkine
University of California, Berkeley
This lecture followed the lives of the original Bolsheviks from the time they joined the apocalyptic sect known as “the party of a new type” to the time most of them were arrested for terrorism and treason. It will focus on the connection between private lives and millenarian expectations and attempt to clarify the reasons for socialism’s premature demise.
Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include: The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017); The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2004), which won the National Jewish Book Award; and Arctic Mirrors: Russian and the Small Peoples of the North (Cornell University Press), 1984. Slezkine has been a visiting lecturer at Oxford University and Vassar College, and has received fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), among others.