2008: Michael Marrus, “Some Measure of Justice 01, Seeking Justice: Holocaust Wrongs Meet American Law”

November 24, 2008

Michael Marrus (1941-2022), “Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990’s 01, Seeking Justice: Holocaust Wrongs Meet American Law”

George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/program/

Monday, 24 November 2008, 19:30 IDT

This lecture series was published as Some Measure of Justice: The Holocaust Era Restitution Campaign of the 1990s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2009).

Michael Marrus, Some Measure of Justice book cover

2008.11.24-25 - Michael Marrus - Some Measure of Justice

Van-Leer Institute Jerusalem
43 Jabotinsky Street
Jerusalem 9214116
ISRAEL

Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of History

Chair: Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Lecture Series Overview: Can there ever be justice for the Holocaust? During the 1990s—triggered by lawsuits in the United States against Swiss banks, German corporations, insurance companies, and owners of valuable works of art—claimants and their lawyers sought to rectify terrible wrongs committed more than a half century earlier. Some Measure of Justice explores this most recent wave of justice-seeking for the Holocaust: what it has been, why it emerged when it did, how it fits with earlier reparation to the Jewish people, its significance for the historical representation of the Holocaust, and its implications for justice-seeking in our time. Writings on the subject of Holocaust reparations have largely come from participants, lawyers, philosophers, journalists, and social scientists specializing in restitution. In Some Measure of Justice Michael Marrus takes up the issue as a historian deeply involved with legal issues. He engages with larger questions about historical understanding and historical interpretation as they enter the legal arena. Ultimately this book asks, What constitutes justice for a great historic wrong? And, Is such justice possible?

Michael R. Marrus was the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto and author, among other works, of The Holocaust in History, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, and The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-46. He was coauthor, with Robert Paxton, of Vichy France and the Jews. In 2008 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he delivered the George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures.
https://sheldonkirshner.com/michael-marrus-a-distinguished-historian-of-the-holocaust/

Steven E. Aschheim is Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem where he taught Cultural and Intellectual History in the Department of History since 1982 and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. He also acted as the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German Literature and Cultural History. Apart from academic journals, he has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books and Ha’aretz.

He has spent sabbaticals at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and in 2002-3 was the first Mosse Exchange Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During September-October 2005 he taught at Columbia University as the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Scholar of German Studies. He has also taught at the University of Maryland, Reed College, the Free University in Berlin and the Central European University in Budapest. He taught at the University of Toronto in 0ctober 2008 and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from September-December 2009. He served as a Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in the summer of 2010 and in March-April 2011 was the Stan Gold Visiting Professor of Jewish History at Trinity College, Dublin. In 2013-2014 he was a Fellow of the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University School of Law. In April 2016 he was a Fellow at the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig and in November 2016 was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2017 (September-October), he held the first Menasseh Ben Israel Institute Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and also taught at the University of Antwerp. He is married, has three children – and five grand-daughters and two grandsons.

He is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) which has been translated into German and Hebrew; Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996); In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), which has also appeared in Italian, and presently being translated into German, and Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is the editor of the conference volume, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), also translated into Hebrew. His At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German and Jewish History (Palgrave Macmillan) appeared in June 2012. A volume, co-edited with Vivian Liska, entitled The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (Berlin, De Gruyter) appeared in 2015. His volume entitled Fragile Spaces: Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities appeared in 2018.