Jewish and Roma people died side by side in the Holocaust, yet in the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide has increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while Europe’s Roma experiences went largely ignored. Ari Joskowicz’s new book Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews, and the Holocaust tells the untold story of how Roma communities turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought recognition and reparations.
Rain of Ash provides a revelatory account of the unequal but necessary entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for historical justice and the self-representation that challenges us to radically rethink the way we remember the Holocaust.
Joskowicz will be in conversation with Dr. Petra Gelbart, a grandchild of Roma Holocaust survivors and an ethnomusicologist and music therapist who has been researching Holocaust commemoration for two decades.
Ari Joskowicz is associate professor of Jewish studies, history, and European studies at Vanderbilt University and the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France.
Dr. Petra Gelbart is a Romani educator, clinician, and activist who spends most of her time in New York City. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2010 with a dissertation titled “Learning Music, Race and Nation in the Czech Republic.” She went on to earn a Master’s in music psychotherapy, eventually splitting her time between teaching and clinical work. Gelbart has been active in several Romani organizations over the past twenty-five years, and was the curator-in-chief for RomArchive’s music section. She co-founded the Naše romské dítě/Amaro drom, a project that has directly served Romani children in Czech foster care since 2005.
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