Criminalizing Difference in the Holocaust and Beyond: Jews, Roma, African Americans, and Latinx People

In order to subjugate or in some cases destroy racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, a state or governing body often criminalizes whole communities through the mobilization of legal and societal discrimination. This panel brings together experts on criminalization and state discrimination against European Jews, Roma communities and individuals, and Native Peoples of the U.S. and Canada that occurred during overlapping periods.  

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. 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. This interdisciplinary study will explore the persecution experienced by these communities at the hands of their governments and by exclusionary state laws.

“Criminalizing Difference” is part of a three-day symposium at ISU, UNI, and the University of Iowa co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as part of its Great Plains Regional Programming theme, “Physical and Social Spaces of Exclusion in Nazi Germany and the Great Plains.” 

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.

This lecture will be recorded and ready to view on the Available Recordings page approximately 24-36 hours after the conclusion of the event. Additionally, the cosponsors of this event have provided access to a live stream, which will begin at the start of the lecture at this link.