Farewell NCGS!
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The academic year 2023-24 was after 17 years the last for the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series, but we will continue the he Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History.
Many thanks for all your support!
Announcement
2025 Winner of the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History
Lauren Crawford I Ph.D. candidate I Yale University, Department of History
The North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series (NCGS) is proud to award the seventh annual Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Modern Central European History in 2025 to Lauren Crawford, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. Her submission is entitled “Antisemitism because of Auschwitz, not despite it:” Secondary Antisemitism and the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War, and is taken from her forthcoming dissertation called “Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the ‘War on Terror’ in Germany.”
Crawford’s dissertation, “Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the ‘War on Terror’ in Germany” intervenes in multiple current debates – about German “memory culture,” antisemitism, and Germany’s relationship to Israel, to name but a few – by reconceptualizing the process by which the Holocaust became the normative source of the German liberal democratic state’s ethical commitments over the course of the last forty years. In her Konrad H. Jarausch Prize submission – the first chapter of her dissertation – Crawford traces how, starting in the early 1980s, a group of German Jewish leftists began to call attention to the antisemitism they perceived in some non-Jewish German critiques of Zionism and Israel. Activist-academics such as Dan Diner and the Canadian sociologist Moishe Postone, who spent a decade in Frankfurt am Main, criticized non-Jewish German leftists’ refusal to acknowledge that the Holocaust was qualitatively different from Israeli policies in the occupied territories. In response, Crawford argues that these intellectuals foregrounded the causal role that antisemitism played in the Holocaust as a means to differentiate it from what they understood as colonial violence in Israel-Palestine and to challenge the dominant ’68 understanding of Nazism as merely the outgrowth of capitalism. From this reckoning emerged new conceptual understandings of the Holocaust on the Left as an exceptional crime, which would become the basis for Germany’s ethical commitments in the 1990s.
The prize committee notes the breadth of Crawford’s research and her sober and contextual approach to intellectual history. Committee members furthermore applaud Crawford for taking on a difficult historical question without engaging in polemics. As such she deserves this year’s prize, which serves to celebrate outstanding new talent in the field of Central European history. It is to be awarded annually to a doctoral student author in recognition of the longstanding commitment to graduate education of Konrad H. Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor emeritus of European Civilization at the History Department of the University of North Carolina.
The Prize Committee:
- Dr. James Chappel (Duke University)
- Dr. Jens-Uwe Guettel (Chair, UNC Chapel Hill)
- Dr. Karen Hagemann (UNC Chapel Hill)
- Dr. Donna Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University),
- Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (University of Colorado Boulder)
- Dr. Adam Seipp (Texas A&M University)
- Dr. Andrea Sinn (Elon University)
Past CONVENERS of the NCGS SERIES:
Carolina Seminars I Duke University: Department of German Studies I Department of History I The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures I Department of History and
