The Miller Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont presents its Annual Holocaust Comemoration Lecture, this year delivered by Lisa Moses Leff.
Date and time: Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 4pm
Place: 338 Waterman Building, Burlington
Info: Write to Jonathan Huener at jhuener@uvm.edu
Lisa Moses Leff is a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (2006). Her more recent book is The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015).
In The Archive Thief, Leff tells the gripping story of the Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski. Born into poverty in Russian Poland in 1911, Szajkowski was a self-made man who made a life for himself as a journalist in 1930s Paris, and then, after a harrowing escape to New York in 1941, as a scholar. Although he never taught at a university or even earned a PhD, Szajkowski became one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of the Jews in modern France, publishing in Yiddish, English, and Hebrew. His work opened up new ways of thinking about Jewish emancipation, economic and social modernization, and the rise of modern anti-Semitism.
Yet as Leff recounts, Szajkowski stole tens of thousands of archival documents related to French Jewish history from public archives and collections in France and moved them, illicitly, to New York. Why did this respectable historian become a thief? And why did librarians in the United States and Israel accept these materials from him, turning a blind eye to the signs of ownership they bore?