Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

Never Again – for Whom? Racial Hierarchy in American Holocaust Memory

Tue, April 14, 2026
Dinner Program
Barry Trachtenberg

Barry Trachtenberg, historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide at Wake Forest University, will trace the shifting American interpretations of the U.S. response to the Holocaust since World War II, from wartime admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, to 1960s critiques framing American policy as one of “abandonment,” to more recent scholarship emphasizing historical context, constraint, and ambiguity which argues that U.S. responses to Nazi atrocities were not uniquely callous but instead consistent with longstanding patterns of structural racism, immigration restriction, and isolationism. Finally, he will address how the U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza—unfolding amid real-time global documentation—forces a reassessment of claims that ignorance explains past inaction and raises enduring questions about whose lives are valued in American foreign policy.

(Parents Dining Room)

A historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide, Barry Trachtenberg is the author of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish (Rutgers, 2022), The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse, 2008). He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, Jacobin, and the Forward. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School.

He holds the Michael H. and Deborah Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.

Professor Trachtenberg’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

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