Cohort VII – Academic year 2014-2015

Aliza Luft, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Aliza Luft’s research focuses on the decision-making processes underlying individuals’ behaviors in high-risk contexts, particularly in genocides as they decide whether to support or resist violent state regimes. Luft’s dissertation, Defecting from the Episcopate, examines the process by which French bishops during the Holocaust in France deviated from their…

Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin

Claims Conference Fellows come from, and are studying in, numerous countries. Sylwia Szymanska-Smolkin, originally from Poland, is one of the scholars whose research is partially funded by the Claims Conference. Sylwia is studying the Polish Police and their dealings with the Jewish population during WWII, but growing up in Jozefow, Poland, she was not really…

Cohort III – Academic year 2010-2011

Irena Cantorovich‘s dissertation on “Jews in the Mixed Detachments of the Partisan Movement in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine (1941-1944)” is intended to shed new light on the Jewish life in Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine during the Holocaust. In her work, Ms. Cantorovich hopes to increase the understanding of the complicated relationship between Jews and gentiles…