The story of Jewish refugees in China during World War II is something that relatively few people understand or know about in the overall history of Jewish immigration and settlement. As many as 16,000 Jews fled Europe during WWII to live and work in Shanghai. This exhibit is in collaboration with the Jewish Refugees Museum of Shanghai and consists of 45 storyboards outlining the process of immigration from Europe to China, the various struggles and cultural adaptions, and the personal stories of survivors and their families. The exhibit offers a unique perspective on the lives and struggles of individuals who lived in China during the war and emphasizes the cross-cultural intersections of both Chinese and the Jewish settlers during a chaotic and significant historic period.

This exhibit is being generously underwritten by the University of Pittsburgh Confucius Institute and Hanban, the Edward and Rose Berman Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Jewish Studies Program, and the University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies Center.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Steve Hochstadt

Steve Hochstadt has been Professor of History at Illinois College since 2006, after teaching at Bates College in Maine for 27 years. He was educated at Brown University: BA 1971, PhD 1983. His first book, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989 (University of Michigan Press, 1999), won the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association. Sources of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is a collection of documents widely used in Holocaust courses. Most recently, he published Death and Love in the Holocaust: The Story of Sonja and Kurt Messerschmidt, in collaboration with the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. Hochstadt writes a weekly column for the Jacksonville (IL) Journal-Courier.

Hochstad's grandparents escaped from Vienna in 1939 and went to Shanghai. He has written two books about the flight of Jews to China. Excerpts from German interviews are used to tell that story in Shanghai-Geschichten: Die judische Flucht nach China, published in Berlin in 2007. Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich, based on a dozen interviews in English with former refugees, was published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan.

The lecture is free and open to the public with preregistration (for nonstudents; students with valid university ID need not register in advance). For preregistration and more information please contact: yuz55@pitt.edu