Where Memory Leads:
A Holocaust Scholar Looks Back

Saul Friedländer In conversation with Steven J. Ross, historian and director, Casden Institute for the Study of American Jewish Life
Wednesday, Feb 8, 2017 | 7:15pm Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and UCLA Professor Emeritus Saul Friedländer returns to memoir to recount a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents. In Where Memory Leads: My Life, a sequel to Friedländer’s poignant first memoir, Where Memory Comes, published forty years ago and recently reissued with a new introduction from Claire Messud, he bridges the gap between the ordeals of his childhood during the German Occupation of France and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. Reflecting on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, Friedländer discusses this book and his life’s work with historian Steven J. Ross.

Saul Friedländer

Saul Friedländer is an award-winning Israeli historian and currently a professor of history at UCLA. He was born in Prague to a family of German-speaking Jews, grew up in France, and experienced the German Occupation of 1940-1944. His historical works have received great praise and recognition, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.

Steven J. Ross

Steven J. Ross is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of American Jewish Life. His book, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, received the prestigious Theater Library Association Book Award for 1999 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History. Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, received a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a Film Scholars Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The son of two Holocaust survivors, Ross’s latest book, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews and Their Spies Foiled Nazi and Fascist Plots Against Hollywood and America, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.

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Main image: Holocaust Memorial, Berlin  Credit: Carlo Scherer

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