鶹ý Honors International Holocaust Remembrance Day with Public Lecture and Exhibit
Professor Roemer’s public lecture, “The Holocaust: Then and Now, Spanning the Void,” will take placeThursday,January 26, 7:00-8:30 p.m.,in Wittemyer Courtroom (Room 101) in the Wolf Law Building on the 鶹ý campus, one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27). RSVPs are appreciated as space is limited. Please emailCUJewishStudies@colorado.eduor call 303-492-7143.
TheLawyers Without Rightsexhibit will be on displayJanuary 5 through January 30, 2017in the William A. Wise Law Library in the Wolf Law Building on the 鶹ý campus. The exhibit is sponsored by the William A. Wise Library at the University of Colorado Law School and the CU Program in Jewish Studies, in conjunction with the American Bar Association and the German Federal Bar.
The Lecture
Professor Roemer’s lecture is the fifth annual event hosted by 鶹ý’s Program in Jewish Studies in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The voids and empty spaces in theJewish Museum in Berlin evoke destruction and absence. The"Memory Void," one of the symbolic spaces on the grounds of the museum, which was designed by Daniel Libeskind, recalls the Holocaust as well as themany lives that might have been had the millions of people who died in the Holocaust lived to see another day. In his lecture, Professor Roemer will explore absences andvoidsas important aspects ofremembrance. Anawareness isapparent incommunal and family remembrances but often obscured in public commemorations in museums and onHolocaust remembrance days. Professor Roemer willdevelop thetheme ofabsenceand advance models of remembrance that viewthe Holocaust as a past event within the context of an annihilated future.
Nils Roemer is the Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor in Holocaust Studies and the Director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his PhD in History from Columbia University in 2000.
In addition to his numerous published articles, Professor Roemer is the author ofJewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith(2005) andThe Story of Worms: German Cities – Jewish Memories(2010). He is currently finishing a book-length study on Central European Jewish travel writing in the 20thcentury.
Professor Roemer serves as a board member for the Leo Baeck Institute in London and is an external reviewer for multiple scholarly journals. He has received numerous fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Exhibit
TheLawyers Without Rightsexhibit has been shown in nearly 100 cities across Germany, the United States, and other parts of the world. The idea for the exhibit was conceived in 1998 when an Israeli lawyer asked the regional bar of Berlin for a list of Jewish lawyers whose licenses had been revoked by the Nazi regime.
“The regional bar decided not only to research a list of names, but also to try to find out more about the fates behind all those names,” said Axel Filges, past president of the German Federal Bar. “Some were able to leave the country after the Nazis came into power, but very many of them were incarcerated or murdered. The non-Jewish German lawyers of those days remained silent. They failed miserably, and so did the lawyers’ organizations. We do not know why.”
After the Berlin bar transformed its research into an exhibit, other regional bars began asking whether they could show it and add their own research.
“So, like a puzzle, a portrait of the fate of Jewish lawyers in Germany has emerged step by step,” Filges said.
For more information about the lecture or exhibit, please visit, or call 303-492-7143.