The first day of online events at Jewish Book Week 2026 features Jonathan Brent and Christoph Dieckmann exploring YIVO’s role in preserving European Jewish culture, while illuminating how history and scholarship confront the Holocaust’s seismic impact on European civilization and humanity.

In his Memoirs (1951), the revolutionary writer Victor Serge, who was not himself Jewish, observed that the Holocaust had shaken “even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization.” This conversation between Jonathan Brent and Christoph Dieckmann, chaired by Bodley’s Librarian Richard Ovenden, explores that threatened “idea of the human” within both its Jewish and its European context—how it developed through centuries of interaction and reciprocal influence, and how the Nazi catastrophe obliterated what Edmund Husserl termed the “idea of Europe,” alongside six million Jewish lives. Brent and Dieckmann consider what the “idea of Europe” can mean today, and how two millennia of European Jewish culture—documented and preserved in the collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—not only reflect its evolution and spirit but may also help to restore it.

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This event will last approximately 1 hour.

In partnership with Lockdown University

In association with YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Jonathan Brent

Jonathan Brent’s books include Stalin’s Last Crime (2003); and Inside the Stalin Archives (2008). He teaches history and literature at Bard College. Brent became Executive Director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 2009 and in 2019 he received the Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania.

Christoph Dieckmann

Christoph Dieckmann is a German historian who directs a sound-history study, Sounds of Anti-Jewish Persecution, at the University of Bern. His book Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 (German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941–1944) was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.

Richard Ovenden

Richard Ovenden OBE is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian (since the post was set up in 1600) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Since 1987 he has worked in a number of important archives and libraries, including the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland (as a Curator of Rare Books) and in the University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of Collections. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.