From the Ottoman Empire to Auschwitz: The Mediterranean Jewish Experience of the Holocaust

Western Washington University and The Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity brings UW’s Dr. Devin Naar to Bellingham.

Although usually understood as a “European” event, the Holocaust also resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews born in the predominantly Muslim world of the Ottoman Empire (Greece). Grappling with the particularities of their experiences compels us to expand the scope of the Holocaust into the eastern Mediterranean and to recognize the interconnections between the rise of Hitler’s empire and the making of the modern Middle East.

Devin Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor of Sephardic Studies at the University of Washington. He is the founder of the Sephardic Studies Program at the UW and currently its acting chair.