3:00pm
710 Social Sciences
Orry Klainman (Department of History)
"Jewish DP Immigration Desires after World War II"
Orry Klainman is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of Minnesota. Previously he completed a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East with a particular emphasis on moments of popular violence and insurgency.
The larger project of Klainman's M.A. thesis was concerned with the strength and application of Zionist rhetoric focused on European Jewish immigration to Palestine. While researching this subject Klainman came across an archive of interviews conducted by a psychology professor from Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology named David Boder. In 1946, Boder interviewed 118 people, most of them Jewish "displaced persons," making him arguably the first person to record oral histories from Jewish survivors. In going through Boder's interviews, Klainman recorded important information from each one and ended up with some interesting data. Klainman will share information about the immigration desires of displaced Jews after World War II.
