KHC-NEH Lecture (In Person & Online) Deciding Who Was Worth Saving: American Universities and the Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Era

Event Cosponsored by HHREC

Register to watch online: https://tinyurl.com/y5fab4bt
Register to attend in person: https://tinyurl.com/2pn52zu8

Despite the triumphalist tale that during the Nazi era the United States rescued Europe’s intellectual elite, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, thousands of European scholars sought to immigrate to the United States and couldn’t. American universities refused to hire them and the State Department erected barrier to letting them in, meaning many lost not only their livelihoods, but also their lives. Dr. Laurel Leff, author of Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 2019), will introduce a few of those scholars and explain how academic institutions in the United States undertook these fraught choices.