On Friday, November 1 at 1:30 p.m. in the Alumni Lounges of the Robert A. Scott Center at Ramapo College (SC158), Dr. Laura B. Cohen, the Kupferberg Holocaust Center’s Executive Director, will unpack the term of “Ethnic Cleansing” and analyze how the phenomenon is connected to genocide. Her talk, “Ethnic Cleansing: The Language of Mass Murder,” is presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

Dr. Cohen will raise issues that have vexed experts and laypeople for years. The trouble is that the lines between what we have come to know as “Ethnic Cleansing” (the process of removing a group or groups from specific geographic or political area based on race, ethnicity, religion and/or other criteria.) and Genocide, as defined in the 1948 U.N. Convention, are frankly blurred. Dr. Cohen’s presentation will examine the topic against the backdrop of the hostilities that followed the breakup of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Dr. Laura B. Cohen is Executive Director of the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College, CUNY in Bayside, New York. Dr. Cohen received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University’s Division of Global Affairs where she researched the intersection of transitional justice and contested narratives at the Srebrenica genocide memorial in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her analysis builds upon the extensive fieldwork she has conducted across that country since 2010 as well as at additional atrocity site memorials in Germany, Poland, Cambodia, and Rwanda. Dr. Cohen also holds an M.S. from New York University’s Center of Global Affairs and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. She previously spent fourteen years in the corporate sector, including Ogilvy and Mather as well as Viacom Media.