2024 AJC Murray Friedman Memorial Lecture

Welcome to the 2024 AJC Murray Friedman Memorial Lecture

For Once We Were Strangers in a Strange Land: Refugees Then and Now

We are in the midst of the greatest global refugee crisis since the 1930s and ‘40s. News reports today about refugees, asylum seekers, the undocumented, and forcibly displaced persons echo articles of a near century ago. Renowned historian Debórah Dwork explores the Jewish refugee experience of the Nazi years to shed light on an all too pressing issue of our time.

Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dr Dwork weaves their narratives into the history she writes. Her award-winning books include Children With A Star; Flight from the Reich; Auschwitz; and Holocaust. Her most recent work, Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2025. Professor Dwork is also a leading authority on university education in this field: she envisioned and actualized the first doctoral program anywhere in the world specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. Debórah Dwork has received numerous honors, including the Annetje Fels-Kupferschmidt Award (2022) bestowed by the Dutch Auschwitz Committee, and the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020).