24.08.2023

Christina Wirth awarded 2023-2024 Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies

IEG staff member Christina Wirth is to be the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies. She will be in residence at the Institute in April 2024. As part of the fellowship, Wirth will conduct research on Jewish survivors’ experiences of antisemitism in the immediate years after the Holocaust. This research is part of her broader dissertation project, entitled From ‘Displaced Persons’ to ‘Refugee’: Categorizing and Representing People in Transit (1944-1951), which is part of the CRC project "Human Differentiation" in Mainz.

At the Institute, Wirth will examine what the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies and related institutional records reveal about how thousands of Jews were threatened by antisemitic pogroms, hostile governments, and the antisemitic tendencies of some of the administrators of Displaced Persons (DPs) camps in the aftermath of World War Two. By doing so, Wirth will offer valuable insights into the continuity of antisemitism beyond the predominant focus on its relationship to the Holocaust, and by using oral history testimonies will demonstrate how neither Jewish life nor antisemitism vanished after 1945.