January 28, 2008

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Jews in the Culture and Society of Weimar
will be Subject of Talk at Ramapo College

(Mahwah) - Eric D. Weitz, author of Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007), will speak at Ramapo College of New Jersey Thursday, February 21 at 1 p.m. in the Robert A. Scott Student Center, Room SC-138.  The presentation is free and open to the public.  For more information or to reserve a seat, please call 201.684.7409.

The title of Weitz’s talk will be “Jews, Culture and Mass Society in Weimar Germany.”  It will explore the period's revolutionary cultural creativity in relation to the emergence of Jews as proponents and practitioners of modernity.  Dr. Weitz will view this dynamic in the context of a fragile republic facing manifold economic and political challenges, while its capital, Berlin, became a center of avant-garde art, sexual emancipation, mass culture and modernist architecture.  His talk will illuminate how anti-Semitism figured prominently in uniting members of the traditional elites with the Nazi-led radical Right to bring down Weimar.  Weitz contends that the demise of the fragile republic and its Jewish population was not a forgone conclusion.

Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A Century of Genocide and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990 (both Princeton). The talk will be sponsored by Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the History Club.

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