In the late 1980s, following the famous Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) about the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust, the German-Israeli scholar Dan Diner proposed the concept of the Zivilisationsbruch, the “rupture in civilization.” With the concept of the Zivilisationsbruch, Diner sought to describe the singularity of the Nazi genocide of European Jews as a rupture with basic post-Enlightenment assumptions […]

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. In this talk, Professor Leibman overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her […]