Alongside Jared Polis, the first Jewish governor of Colorado, at the State Capitol, the University of Denver announced plans to become a global hub for scholarship on the Holocaust and antisemitism.
It did so on Jan. 27—International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 81 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp—joined by Holocaust survivors and Colorado residents Osi Sladek and Barbara Steinmetz. Steinmetz also survived the firebombing of pro-Israel marchers in the city of Boulder last June.
The university will establish its first endowed professorship in Holocaust and antisemitism studies, part of DU’s Center for Judaic Studies.
Adam Rovner, director of the center, opened the event by emphasizing the center’s mission: “to educate America’s future leaders responsibly, to connect the generations, to inspire curiosity and to ask hard questions.”
Rovner told JNS that “we reached out to the governor’s people and decided to connect it to International Holocaust Remembrance Day to demonstrate that it’s not just commemoration that counts. We also need education, and that’s what we provide.”
He also noted the importance of studying contemporary manifestations of antisemitism.
“Contemporary manifestations that both come from the extreme right, from white nationalist groups. That’s something many of us have been familiar with for years,” he said, adding that “but an increasingly fringe left manifestation of antisemitism, which often takes the form of anti-Zionism. Now, I’m not going to say that anti-Zionism is entirely always antisemitic, but I think it is guilty until proven innocent.”
He noted that the university attracts students who engage in nuanced conversations about antisemitism and Israel in the classroom.
“The people who want to manipulate and mislead are a very tiny minority,” he said. “A lot of college students across the country were concerned, and I understand that concern with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. No doubt there was, and that exists. But that is different from expressing support of terrorist groups.”
Rovner pointed out that the endowed professorship’s position is new to the program. “We have not had anybody on faculty teach Holocaust studies,” he said, and “there was nothing that explicitly connects antisemitism studies, which is a subdiscipline more popular in Europe, with the discipline of Holocaust studies.”
“I wanted to raise the profile of this undoubted connection and make it angled so that a scholar can come to the university and look not only at what occurred throughout time and, depending on how you understand history, what led to the Holocaust,” he explained. “But also to look at the manifestations that have occurred since the Holocaust and to try to understand these threats to a civil society and try to connect them back to the war against the Jewish people.”
Rovner told JNS the program, which he described as the fourth-oldest Judaic studies center in the United States, primarily educates non-Jewish students. “Our classes at the center have an approximate 80% non-Jewish student body,” he said. “Those students are eager to learn about all kinds of facets of the Jewish experience.”
The university will soon launch a “high-profile search” for candidates.
At the Capitol event, Polis praised the initiative. “The promise of never again is frankly a call to action for all of us,” he said. “We also know that antisemitism continues to rear its ugly head, including right here on our own doorstep with the horrific attacks on Pearl Street Mall in Boulder that Barbara horrifically experienced and heroically survived.”
He added that “this new professor for Holocaust and antisemitism studies at the University of Denver is a really important way to elevate Holocaust awareness and education and understanding and responding to the rise we see in antisemitism today across the world.”
