International Chair for the History of the Second World War 2024-2025
"Holocaust Bystanders: a History of the Modern State at War" by Raz Segal
For its twelfth edition, the International Chair for the History of the Second World War at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in partnership with CegeSoma, will welcome Raz Segal in December 2024. Raz Segal is an Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University.
The title of his opening lecture, scheduled for December 9, 2024, at 6:30 pm in Auditorium R42.5.503 (DRION), is: "Holocaust Bystanders: A History of the Modern State at War."
The opening lecture will be followed by the presentation of the Baron Velge Award, a reception, and a photo exhibition in the Coin Culture (Av. Paul Héger, Building U, ULB, Faculty of Philosophy & Social Sciences).
Raz Segal teaches Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, New Jersey. He studied at Tel Aviv University and earned his PhD at Clark University. His major monograph, « « Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 », was published by Stanford University Press in 2016 and reissued in paperback in 2020.
In this groundbreaking study, Segal examines the fate of the Jewish population in Subcarpathian Rus within the broader context of minority policies in the region from 1914 to 1945, under Habsburg, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian rule. The region was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 and is now part of Ukraine. His research demonstrates that the genocide of the Jews was part of a larger European history, thereby shifting existing interpretive paradigms.
Raz Segal is currently researching other regions in Southeast Europe, particularly western Thrace under Bulgarian rule during World War II. This work is part of a book project on the distortion, weaponization, and mobilization of Holocaust history in the perpetuation of white supremacy and state violence, with a focus on Israel’s actions against Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba to the ongoing genocidal assaults on Gaza.
(*) This Chair is being organized for the twelfth time by ULB's Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, thanks to the generosity of the late Baron Jean-Charles Velge, who passed away on May 29, 2010, and wished to honor the memory of Jean Vanwelkenhuyzen, historian of the Second World War and former director of the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes historiques de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, now CegeSoma.