Hans Roggers lived in Germany on the eve of World War II. After
witnessing the destruction of Jewish businesses, homes and
synagogues by Nazi sympathizers in Germany during Kristallnacht in
1938, Roggers and his Jewish family fled the country, settling down
in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
Roggers joined UCLA’s history department in 1961, and for
the next four decades, he researched topics ranging from
18th-century Russian national consciousness to Russian governmental
policy toward Jews, an area in which his studies were highly
influential.
Colleagues, students and close friends of Roggers, who died in
2002 from a stroke, will be honoring his memory and work at a
memorial conference Monday.
The conference will be cosponsored by the UCLA Center for
European and Eurasian Studies, the history department, the UCLA
Center for Jewish Studies, and Stanford’s Taube Center for
Jewish Studies.
Christine Wilson, outreach coordinator for the UCLA Center for
European and Eurasian Studies, said the conference ““ titled
“On the Historical Imagination of the Outsider: Russia, Jews,
and the Work of Hans Roggers ““ will show the breadth and
depth of the work Roggers did and inspired.
“His work on Russia and Jews in Russia was very
groundbreaking. … It was very fitting to have a conference that
would bring people together that would work with him and had been
influenced by his work,” she said.
Speakers at the conference will address topics that include
examining Roggers as a second-generation refugee historian and
looking at Jewish social history in the 19th and and early 20th
centuries.
Steven Zipperstein, Koshland Professor of Jewish culture and
history at Stanford University, will speak at the conference about
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text that originated in late
imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
Zipperstein said the text is widely disseminated by anti-Semitic
causes, and his talk will explore why it has remained a
“resonant staple” of anti-Semitism a century after it
surfaced.
Zipperstein, who earned a doctorate in Russian and Jewish
history at UCLA while studying under Roggers, returned to teach at
the university before accepting a position at Stanford.
Though Zipperstein and Roggers were colleagues at one point, he
said he considers himself “very much a student,” rather
than a co-worker, of Roggers.
The conference will be held in Royce Hall 314 from 9 a.m. to
5:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.