MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | RETHINKING NECROPOLITICS

Bodies Visible and Invisible: The necro-politics of the Jewish Cemetery in the Life of Modern Thessaloniki

OCTOBER 2 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

On 6 December, 1942 Greek fascists in Thessaloniki began the destruction of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. Within three weeks it was a field of rubble to be pillaged. For more than seventy years this act of desecration, when remembered at all, was said to be a by-product of the Holocaust. This talk will suggest why this was an improbable claim: the Nazis had little interest in destroying Jewish cemeteries; all the major European ones survive. More generally the talk examines the necropolitics of forgetting, mis-remembering, finally coming to terms with the fate of these dead. It ends with the dedication of a memorial on 9 November 2014.