(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)December 22, 2015

(MAHWAH, NJ) –Dr. Avinoam Patt, the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, on November 4 spoke about “Humor in Responding to the Trauma of the Holocaust.”  The event was sponsored by The Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

On first glance, discussing humor in relation to the Holocaust may seem off-key and offensive. Dr. Patt, though, showed how, up to a certain point, comedy represented a way for victims to cope with the tragic circumstances in which they found themselves. During the war, in the ghettoes, Jews inverted anti-Semitic stereotypes to mock their Nazi tormentors, while after their liberation, in the Displaced Persons camps of the U.S. and British zones of Germany, they used dark humor, self-mockery and satire to cope with the burdens of survival. Dr. Patt emphasized that in both situations the traditions of pre-war Jewish humor, mostly intrinsic in the Yiddish language, were clearly in evidence.

At the University of Hartford since 2007, Dr. Patt teaches courses on Modern Jewish History, American Jewish History, the Holocaust, the History of Zionism and the State of Israel, Jewish film, and Modern Jewish Literature among others. He is also director of the University’s Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, May 2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011).

He is also director of the In Our Words Interview Project with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Most recently, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary American Jewish fiction entitled The New Diaspora: The Changing Face of American Jewish Fiction (Wayne State University Press, 2015).

Avinoam Patt holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University and a B.A. in History from Emory University.

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