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Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss on the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto

In partnership with:
With support from: Lowell Institute
Date and time
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Virtual:
Webinar begins at 12:30 pm

The People’s Uprising and the Fall of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 1942–June 1943, a new book by Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss, sheds light on the lives, choices, and experiences of the tens of thousands of Jews who were not part of the underground armed resistance, but nonetheless supported the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This riveting and dramatic account focuses on the final year of the Warsaw ghetto, from the Great Deportation in the summer of 1942 through the suppression of the uprising in mid-1943. Drawing on powerful contemporary testimonies, diaries, and documents—many of them previously unexplored—Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss reveals how members of the broader Jewish population struggled to survive, maintain family and community life, and make impossible moral decisions in the face of fear, hunger, and daily violence. Looking beyond the fighters themselves, the book offers a story of devastation, but also of resilience and human dignity.

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Havi Ben-Sasson Dreifuss is professor of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, where she heads the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations. She also serves as the director of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem. She is the author of Relations Between Jews and Poles: The Jewish Perspective.
a white man with a checkered button down shirt sitting in the shade of a tree
Sven-Erik Rose is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. His scholarship focuses on Holocaust literature, German-Jewish thought, and the cultural and philosophical responses to trauma and memory. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in the category of Philosophy and Jewish Thought. He has written widely on critical theory and Holocaust representation. His latest book, Making and Unmaking Holocaust Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos, brings literary analysis into dialogue with urgent ethical and historical questions about violence, resistance, and remembrance.
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