History, Memory, and Law

The emotions of pride and shame frequently weigh heavily on reckoning with historical past. While in the aftermath of traumatic events some communities turned to commissions of “truth and reconciliation,” in others the legal system became a forum for facing the past. This course will consider three examples of turning to law and courts to deal with historical past: France’s reckoning with the Vichy regime, the recent public trials in the US for racial crimes committed in the Civil Rights Era, and Poland’s turn to law and legislation while facing its Holocaust era past.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2005), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), and two edited volumes, as well as numerous articles in English, Italian, Polish, and Hebrew. 

Her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (in 2007 and 2012), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel), among others. In 2002, she was a Harry Starr Fellow in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, in 2007-2008, an Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies also at Harvard University, and in 2017-2018 she was the Mellon Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, completing her book on blood libels in premodern Europe. In 2012-2016, she served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and in 2015-2017 as the Vice-President for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies. She is currently the Treasurer of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

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