Holocaust Education Center presents Laurel Leff

The Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center will present author Laurel Leff at the Victor Baxt Lecture Series event March 20.  Her topic is “Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life- and-Death Decisions on Hiring Scholars From Nazi Europe.” Leff will speak at the Cranston Public Library on Sockanosset Cross Road at 2 p.m.

During the Nazi era, American universities had one of the few lifelines to extend to the hundreds of thousands of people trying to flee Europe: faculty positions that enabled refugees to immigrate outside of strict quotas. American academic institutions insisted that positions be offered only to scholars who were not too old, not too young, not too left, not too right, and, most important, not too Jewish. The refugee scholars also had to be well-connected and world class.

American professors received lists of European scholars, circling the ones who were worth hiring and – by extension – worth saving.

As a result, for every intellectual who survived and thrived in the United States, thousands more did not. Leff will explore this little-known aspect of the intellectual migration and the broader questions of America’s role in rescuing those persecuted in their home countries.

Leff is an associate professor of journalism and associate director of Jewish studies at Northeastern University in Boston. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald, she has written “Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.” She is working on a book on the response of American elites to the refuge crisis of the 1930s and early 1940s.