Designed for professors of all disciplines but particularly seminary and religious studies faculty, this seminar will explore the shift in Catholic thought on the Jews since 1965 resulting from the promulgation of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate ("In Our Age"). The statement about Jews in Nostra Aetate reversed and refuted ideas that went back to the Church’s earliest days and grew out of deep theological reflection occasioned by witnessing the Holocaust. While the best-known images from Vatican II emphasize the deliberations of bishops, the actual intellectual impetus for the revolution came from the margins of the Church, specifically a small group of converts to Catholicism, many of them from Judaism. How did they succeed in making themselves heard in an institution that, to many, had seemed impervious to change? This seminar will examine the primary influences—historical, theological, and biographical—on this revolution in Catholic teaching.

The seminar will be taught by John Connelly, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. Professor Connelly is the author ofFrom Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (2012) and Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education (2000), which won the 2001 George Beer Award of the American Historical Association; he is the co-editor of Universities Under Dictatorship (2005). His articles have appeared in Minerva, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, the Nation, theLondon Review of Books, and Commonweal.

Applications are due on February 19. For application guidelines, please visit ushmm.org/research/center/seminars/announcement.php?content=religio....

Please address inquiries and applications to Dr. Victoria Barnett, Programs on Ethics, Religion and the Holocaust, University Programs, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, at 202.488.0469 or vbarnett@ushmm.org.

This seminar is made possible by the Hoffberger Family Fund and by Joseph A. and Janeal Cannon and Family.