Event Details

The Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, the Department for History, and the Department of Humanities at York University are honoured to invite you to a Holocaust Education Week talk “Greek Jewry, The Holocaust, and Public Reckoning Today” with Prof. Devin E. Naar (University of Washington in Seattle) and Prof. Sakis Gekas (York University) on November 10, 2022 at 7pm via Zoom.

Greece, home to one of world’s oldest diasporic Jewish communities, experienced one of Europe’s highest death tolls in the Holocaust. Remarkably, its small surviving population of Sephardic and Romaniote Jews continued to build their lives and communities after WWII. Today, Greece has one of Europe’s few elected Jewish mayors, possesses strong relations with Israel, and is increasingly a site of Holocaust remembrance and pilgrimage. Why was so little known about the Holocaust there for so long? And what meaning does it have for contemporary Greeks, Jewish and non-Jewish?  

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he directs the Sephardic Studies Program and is an affiliate faculty member in the Hellenic Studies Program. A former Fulbright Scholar to Greece, his book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, won a 2016 National Jewish Book Award and the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize from the Modern Greek Studies Association. 

 Sakis Gekas is Associate Professor and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair in Modern Greek History at York University. He works on British colonialism and state formation in Greece, the history of the Greek revolution of 1821, and the history of Greeks in Canada. His publications include Veterans: The fighters of the 1821 Revolution during the Period of King Otto’s State, in Greek, (2022) and Xenocracy. State, Class and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815-1864 (2017), which was published in Greek in 2021.