The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943–May 16, 1943), the largest mass revolt in a major city in Nazi-occupied Europe, is the defining symbol of Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression during World War II. In the days and weeks after the uprising broke out, the news of the revolt captivated the Jewish world, and was seized upon by Jews from diverse ideological backgrounds and movements in locations around the world as the news they had been waiting and wanting to hear for almost four years. Even at the time of the Uprising, the ghetto fighters who organized the revolt were aware of the historic significance of their actions. Described by historian Israel Gutman, who himself was a participant in the revolt, as “literally a revolution in Jewish history (whose) importance was understood all too well by those who fought,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising quickly became the focal point of commemorative activities both during and immediately after the war, appropriated by Holocaust survivors in Europe as the basis for commemoration activities in the DP camps, by leaders in the Yishuv as confirmation of the Zionist worldview, and in the American context, as the “prism through which American Jews performed the memory of the six million” in commemorative activities in the first two decades after World War II. By 1953, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, would designate the 27th of Nisan as the date for Yom HaShoah ve-haGevruah (The Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism) to correspond with the timing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Avinoam Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009) and The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt (2021). He is also co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). His newest books include Israel and the Holocaust (2024) and the document collection, The Surviving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2024).

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies program and Fern and Manfred Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of Religious Studies.