Batchelder Lecture: The Archaeology of Jewish Resistance in the Holocaust

The 2021 Batchelder Lecture will be presented by Dr. Richard Freund, Bertram & Gladys Aaron Professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University, in a virtual event on April 18 at 4 P.M. CT.

One of the most tragic parts of the Holocaust is that many are taught that the Jews went to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.” During the last decade, Prof. Richard Freund has worked with his team of Geoscientists at 20 sites in Lithuania, Greece, and Poland and they have detected a pattern that suggested, rather than being passive victims, many of the Jews at the sites his group has been investigating exhibited an extraordinary and often unique forms of courage and a level of resistance that needed to be brought to the public sphere. He will be speaking on April 18, 2021 (the night before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943) about the different types of resistance that made up the Uprising by looking at sites his geoscience team has been working on in Poland and Lithuania.

About the Speaker: Dr. Richard Freund is the Bertram and Gladys Aaron Professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. He has directed (with his scientific team) sixty geoarchaeology projects in five countries: Israel, Spain, Greece, Poland and Lithuania. His work has been featured in articles in the New York Times, Time magazine, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek, Archaeology, and in Smithsonian magazine and chronicled in 20 television documentaries from National Geographic, CNN, Discovery, History Channel and NOVA and PBS networks. He is the author or co-author of twelve books, hundreds of articles and his most recent book is Archaeology of the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).