The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and by the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies.

 In January 1942, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau, Jewish photographers working for the Soviet press became the first liberators to photograph the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These photographers participated in a social project in which they were emotionally and intellectually invested; they had been dispatched by the Stalinist state to document Nazi atrocities. David Shneer tells the stories of these photographers and highlights their work through their own images; he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives. David Shneer is the Singer Chair of Jewish History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His most recent books includeNew Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (NYU, 2005) and the award-winning Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers, 2011). Professor Shneer has published scholarly articles in leading journals like The American Historical Review and in the popular press such as the Huffington Post and The Jewish Daily Doward.