Reflections on CEU Summer School featuring Fortunoff Archive in Budapest

Last week students completed a two-week CEU Summer Course titled “Holocaust Testimonies and their Afterlives” at Central European University’s (CEU) campus in Budapest. It was organized under the umbrella of the Open Society University Network by four core faculty members from four different institutions: Éva Kovács, Wiener Wiesenthal Institut für Holocaust-Studien (VWI), Michael L. Miller, Nationalism Studies and Jewish Studies Program at CEU, Stephen Naron, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and Avinoam Patt, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies at UConn.

Students from 10 different countries participated in a two-week intensive program which investigated “the genealogy of the era of the witness, the emergence of Holocaust testimony as the model for eyewitness documentation of 20th and 21st-century atrocities, and its impact on efforts to record and represent subsequent human rights abuses and acts of mass violence.”

The course featured lectures by core faculty and public lectures and seminars by Carolyn J. Dean (Yale University), Laura Jockusch (Brandeis), and Noah Shenker (Colgate) and guest lectures by Hungarian scholars, filmmakers and experts such as Ildikó Barna, Péter Forgács, Gergely Kunt, Andrea Szőnyi, and Zsuzsanna Toronyi. The complete program can be viewed here:

Holocaust Testimonies and their Afterlives