The Iowa State Lecture Series will host “Criminalizing Difference in the Holocaust and Beyond: Jews, Roma, African Americans and Latinx People” at 6 p.m. Tuesday. This lecture will feature panelists Kierra Crago-Schneider, Chelsi West Ohueri and Brian Behnken, moderated by Jeremy Best.
“As part of a moderated panel, the speakers will discuss the unique and common characteristics of criminalization and its role in racial prejudice and violence,” according to the Iowa State Lecture Series website. “While discussing specific marginalized groups–Jews, Roma and Native Peoples in the U.S. and Canada–the panelists will help describe the process of creating racialized ‘others’ through legal and societal discrimination.”
The event will be held in the Sun Room, which is located on the second floor of the Memorial Union and has an accessible entrance and universal changing table.
This lecture aims to educate attendees on these diverse communities’ experiences and the oppression their governments forced upon them through exclusionary laws.
Jeremy Best, the moderator of the event, provided a comment on the upcoming lecture in an email statement to the Daily.
“The goal of the keynote panel, ‘Criminalizing Difference in the Holocaust and Beyond,’ is to provide the Iowa State University community with access to on-campus and off-campus experts in the history of racial violence and oppression,” Best stated. “In particular, the panel will address questions about the relationship between criminalization of minoritized and historically disadvantaged communities and how the creation of racial ‘others’ has been at the hands of governments and legal institutions.”
This event is co-sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum, The Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund, William J. Lowenberg Memorial Endowment on America, the Holocaust and the Jews, Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Fund for the Study of Antisemitism, the Department of History and the Iowa State Committee on Lectures.
The panelists in this lecture are qualified to discuss this matter for many reasons, all of which are listed below:
- Kierra Crago-Schneider, the Campus Outreach Program Officer, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Dr. Crago-Schneider is a Holocaust scholar and expert on the experiences of Holocaust survivors in Europe after liberation.
- Chelsi West Ohueri, Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. West Ohueri is a sociocultural anthropologist of race and racialization in southeastern Europe.
- Brian Behnken, Professor, Department of History, affiliate faculty in U.S. Latino/a Studies Program and African and African American Studies Program, Iowa State University. Dr. Behnken is a specialist in the history of civil rights activism and comparative race relations in the United States, especially in African American and Mexican American communities.
- Moderator: Jeremy Best, Associate Professor, Department of History. Dr. Best is a historian of modern Germany specializing in representations of racial difference in the Western cultural imagination during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” according to the Iowa State Lecture Series website.
A recording of the lecture will be available to watch at this link 24 to 36 hours after the lecture takes place. To watch a live stream of the lecture, visit this link.
For more information on the Iowa State Lecture Series, visit their website.
