Author Description

This collection of essays arises from a conference held at the University of Cape Town under the auspices of the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research. Leading international Holocaust scholars met to reflect on the ways their personal experiences influenced their professional trajectories over many decades of immersion in studies of the Holocaust. Participants examined changes and developments in the field within the context of their own personal odysseys, including shifting cultural milieus and robust academic conflicts. Meeting in South Africa provided a special ambience as the country had emerged only two decades earlier from a race-based system defined by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. The massive corpus of scholarly engagement with the Holocaust - with reverberations across the globe - has ensured that its study today is paradigmatic for scholars exploring genocide, as well as perpetrators and victims of antisemitism, racism, and the Second World War.