The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center is pleased to share the following online program: Deciding Who Was Worth Saving: American Universities and the Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Era, presented as part of the 2025–26 Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Time: 12:00 PM EST
Despite the triumphalist tale that during the Nazi era the United States rescued Europe’s intellectual elite, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, thousands of European scholars sought to immigrate to the United States and couldn’t. American universities refused to hire them and the State Department erected barriers to letting them in, meaning many lost not only their livelihoods, but also their lives. Dr. Laurel Leff, author of Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 2019), will introduce a few of those scholars and explain how academic institutions in the United States undertook these fraught choices.
This event is part of the 2025-26 Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.” It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Center for Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora at Northeastern Illinois University; the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University; the Holocaust, Genocide & Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University; the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; the Reiff Center for Human Rights & Conflict Resolution at Christopher Newport University; the Holocaust Resource & Education Center of Kean University; the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University; the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University; and the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College.
To Register Click the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_N-2h39snQdGcRCLdr-Cw8A#/registration
