Lives in Limbo: Jewish Refugees in Portugal, 1940–1945

Renowned scholar Dr. Marion Kaplan will describe the travails of refugees escaping Nazi Europe and awaiting their fate in Portugal.  Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee existence, the talk highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness.

For Jewish refugees, Lisbon emerged as a site of temporality and transition, a “no-man’s-land” between a painful past and a hopeful future. Paying careful attention to the words of refugees in Portugal may help us to understand Jewish heartbreak and perseverance in the 1940s and also to listen compassionately to refugees’ stories in our own times.

Dr. Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History Emerita at New York University. She is the author of several books about Nazi Germany and Jewish refugees who settled in the Dominican Republic and in Portugal. She has won three National Jewish Book Awards for her authored and edited books and been a finalist for a fourth book. Her authored books have been translated into German. She taught modern European, Jewish, and women’s history at Queens College and NYU.

This online webinar is free. RSVP HERE