This is the keynote lecture of the Schwartz-Reisman Graduate Student Conference in Jewish Studies at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. The Schwartz-Reisman Graduate Student Conference in Jewish Studies features presentations of advanced PhD Students' work in the Granovsky-Gluskin Collaborative Program in Jewish Studies.



Keynote: “Beyond Politics: German-Jewish Refugees and Racism in South Africa”
Shirli Gilbert (University College London)

Description:
Between 1933 and the outbreak of World War II, around 6,000 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany landed on South Africa’s shores. Most came not because of any particular connection to the country, but simply because—for a time, at least—it was one of the few places in the world that would let them in. Unlike many other places of refuge in the global south, however, South Africa became a place of settlement rather than of transit: the vast majority who arrived chose to stay.

In this talk I will explore how the German Jewish refugees’ historical experiences of antisemitism informed their engagement with South African racism before and during the early years of apartheid. While a number of refugees were outspoken in their opposition to the regime, the majority engaged with their adopted country in more ambivalent ways. A limited body of research has documented the refugees’ contributions to South African social and cultural life and the close-knit communities they established upon arrival, but almost no work has been done on how the Nazi past informed this particular Jewish group’s protracted engagement with the post-war world’s quintessential racial state.


Shirli Gilbert is a specialist in modern Jewish history, with particular interest in the Holocaust and its legacies, modern Jewish identity, and Jews in South Africa. She holds a D. Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Before coming to UCL, she was Karten Professor of Modern History and Director of the Parkes Institute for Jewish/ non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton.

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