In the summer and autumn of 1936, the Black American sociologist and civil rights activist, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, spent four months in Nazi Germany writing his weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier. Reflecting on his travels in Germany more than a decade later, Du Bois famously described his encounter with antisemitism as something that broadened and completed both his understanding of anti-Black racism and what he called the “colour line”. But his newspaper columns from 1936 tell a more complicated story. Written as he witnessed Nazi persecution in real time, they reveal uncertainty, ambivalence, and puzzlement about how antisemitism related to anti-Black racism. In this lecture, Ben Ratskoff will explore what Du Bois struggled to make sense of in 1936 – and what this struggle can teach us about antisemitism and the challenges of comparison today.
Ben Ratskoff is an assistant professor in the department of Critical Theory & Social Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has published in several edited volumes and scholarly journals, including Jewish Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Genocide Research. His research and teaching focus on comparative approaches to the study of antisemitism, race, and the Holocaust, as well as on the politics of Holocaust memory and representation. He is currently working on a book project analysing Black intellectual representations of Nazi antisemitism as it unfolded between 1933 and 1945.