The Other Side: Law, Education, Ideology & Normalizing the Criminal

Lecture Admission: Free Watch the video

A school board in Texas was recently asked by its executive director to contemplate “opposing views” of the Holocaust. Can such views ever accord with reason, or with social, political and religious values? Hitler explicitly wished to create an “antisemitism of reason” and employed all the institutions of German society — education, law, religion, medicine, science, philosophy and history — to create the logic whereby segregation, expulsion and ultimately genocide was made reasonable, acceptable, normal to the majority of Germans. This lecture by YIVO's executive director Jonathan Brent will explore the other side of “normal.”

About the Speaker

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.