For the 15th year, Chapman University gathers as an interfaith community to commemorate Kristallnacht. We remember those targeted by the antisemitic violence that swept across Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938, and we honor the courageous few who dared to stand with the persecuted and defy Nazi authority.

At this year’s event, Jeffrey Kopstein, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine will bring his disciplinary expertise as a political scientist and his wide-ranging knowledge of the history of anti-Jewish violence to bear on the events of Kristallnacht.

He is the co-author of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust which received the 2019 Bronislaw Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences, given by the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences of America, and author of The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany 1945-1989, among other works. In 2021-22, Professor Kopstein was the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is also a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Professor Kopstein holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine, in 2015 and prior to that taught at the University of Toronto where he was the director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Dr. Kopstein has also taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and been a visiting professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Funded in part by:
• The Sally and Jerry Schwartz Endowment for Holocaust Education
• The John and Toby Martz Distinguished Lecture in Holocaust Studies

Co-sponsored by:
• Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education
• Fish Interfaith Center
• Chapman Interfaith Council

This event is presented in partnership with the Fish Interfaith Center

A reception will follow the event.