Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
11 January 2025
Session VIII: Violence and War
Annette Becker, The Great War: A Laboratory of Violence for the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Moderated by Manuela Consonni
Responses by Sven Reichardt, Omer Bartov
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
Manuela Consonni is the Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also the current director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Her books include: Resistance or Holocaust: The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945-1985 (2010); L’eclisse dell’antifascismo. Resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989 (2015); Three Faces of Antifascism: Narratives of Resistance in Italian Political Culture, forthcoming in spring-summer 2024, and a forthcoming book on Primo Levi, titled: Shedding Skins: Primo Levi on Human Evil, Suffering, and the Power to Resist.
Annette Becker is Professor Emerita of Modern History at Paris-Nanterre and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has written extensively on the Two World Wars and the extreme violence they nurtured, with an emphasis on military occupations. She is now devoting her research to genocides (against the Armenians, against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Holocaust) including humanitarian politics, trauma and memory, particularly among intellectuals and artists. Her latest publications include Messagers du désastre: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les genocides (2018) (Messengers of Disaster: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski and Twentieth-Century Genocides [2021]); L’Immontrable. Guerres et violences extrêmes dans l’art et la littérature (2021); Des Juifs trahis par leur France, 1939-1944 (2024); and Le choc. Le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda, 1994, with Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Samuel Kuhn, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (2024).
Sven Reichardt is Distinguished Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. He has published widely on the history of fascism, the history of war, civil war and terrorism and on social movements and civil societies in late twentieth century history. He has several international awards and fellowships. In summer 2025 he will be senior fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, his early research concerned war crimes in World War II and the links between war and genocide. He has also written on representations of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations, violence, and population displacement in Europe and Palestine. His latest books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine,” which is dedicated to investigating the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel, a generation to which he also belongs. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.
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In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
60 Years: Fascism Seminar Revisited
mosseprogram.wisc.edu/rome
11 January 2025
Session VIII: Violence and War
Annette Becker, The Great War: A Laboratory of Violence for the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Moderated by Manuela Consonni
Responses by Sven Reichardt, Omer Bartov
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
American Academy in Rome
Sapienza Università di Roma
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Leo Baeck Institute
Manuela Consonni is the Pela and Adam Starkopf Chair in Holocaust Studies at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also the current director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Her books include: Resistance or Holocaust: The Memory of the Deportation and Extermination in Italy, 1945-1985 (2010); L’eclisse dell’antifascismo. Resistenza, questione ebraica e cultura politica in Italia dal 1943 al 1989 (2015); Three Faces of Antifascism: Narratives of Resistance in Italian Political Culture, forthcoming in spring-summer 2024, and a forthcoming book on Primo Levi, titled: Shedding Skins: Primo Levi on Human Evil, Suffering, and the Power to Resist.
Annette Becker is Professor Emerita of Modern History at Paris-Nanterre and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has written extensively on the Two World Wars and the extreme violence they nurtured, with an emphasis on military occupations. She is now devoting her research to genocides (against the Armenians, against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Holocaust) including humanitarian politics, trauma and memory, particularly among intellectuals and artists. Her latest publications include Messagers du désastre: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski et les genocides (2018) (Messengers of Disaster: Raphaël Lemkin, Jan Karski and Twentieth-Century Genocides [2021]); L’Immontrable. Guerres et violences extrêmes dans l’art et la littérature (2021); Des Juifs trahis par leur France, 1939-1944 (2024); and Le choc. Le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda, 1994, with Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Samuel Kuhn, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (2024).
Sven Reichardt is Distinguished Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz. He has published widely on the history of fascism, the history of war, civil war and terrorism and on social movements and civil societies in late twentieth century history. He has several international awards and fellowships. In summer 2025 he will be senior fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.
Omer Bartov is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, his early research concerned war crimes in World War II and the links between war and genocide. He has also written on representations of antisemitism in twentieth-century cinema. More recently he has focused on interethnic relations, violence, and population displacement in Europe and Palestine. His latest books include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), and Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023). He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “The Broken Promise: A Personal-Political History of Israel and Palestine,” which is dedicated to investigating the first generation of Jews and Palestinians in Israel, a generation to which he also belongs. His novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel.
+
In 1963, historian George L. Mosse led a landmark seminar at Stanford University, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and countries to analyze the history of Nazism and Italian Fascism, just eighteen years after World War II. Their discussions defined the early parameters of European fascism amidst the post-war era’s intellectual landscape.
Sixty years later, the George L. Mosse Program in History organized a multi-day conference from January 9 to January 12, 2025, to reassess fascism in the context of contemporary European movements. More than thirty scholars from the US, Europe, the UK, and Israel gathered to critically examine and redefine “fascism” in light of present-day populist, anti-democratic, illiberal, and authoritarian ideologies.
