Black Studies and Jewish Studies in Conversation: ‘Memory, Heritage, and Material Remains’

Both the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust have left indelible imprints on societies, public landscapes, and the collective and public memory of the affected regions. In Europe, towns and cities, some of which were predominantly Jewish, were emptied of the population that had lived there for centuries, after their Jewish residents had been murdered. Yet, because they lived there for centuries, their presence is indelibly etched on the towns’ material remains and memory—however suppressed it may have been. Similarly, slavery has left a lasting mark on societies that were involved in the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic, including in material remains and landscape.

Ana Lucia Araujo, a leading scholar on material culture and memory of transatlantic slavery, and Yechiel Weizman, a scholar of history and memory of the Holocaust, will discuss the memory, heritage, material remains, and spatial legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and the Holocaust.

About the Speakers
Ana Lucia Araujo is a social and cultural historian, an art historian, and a professor of history at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. Professor Araujo’s work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, as well as the memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. Araujo writes, speaks, and publishes in English, Portuguese, French, and Spanish, and her work has been translated into German and Dutch. She is the author of many books, including Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery (2014), Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (2020), and the forthcoming The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (2024). In 2023, she was a Getty Residential Senior Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Yechiel Weizman is a scholar of history and memory of the Holocaust and the material history of its aftermath. Weizman teaches at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University. Prior to joining Bar-Ilan, Weizman was a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture and a co-investigator in the research group “Mapping the Archipelago of Lost Towns: Post-Holocaust Urban Lacunae in the Polish-Belarusian- Ukrainian Borderlands” at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is the author of Unsettled Heritage: Living Next to Poland’s Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.