Catholic and Jewish Communities’ Reactions to Antisemitic Violence in Wartime Boston

Join us for the Genevieve Geller Wyner Annual Lecture, in which Professor Laurel Leff, the JHC's 2024 Genevieve Geller Wyner Research Fellow, will explore the tensions between Catholic and Jewish Bostonians during World War II. At the height of World War II, groups of young Irish Catholics rampaged through Boston's Jewish neighborhoods. Boston's Catholic Church said little, and the Jewish community responded with its own form of denial and willful ignorance, hoping to make the conflict go away. As part of her research into the American Catholic Church's role during the Holocaust, Leff examines the fears, forebodings, and rocky relationship of these two important groups in Boston's history.
 

Laurel Leff

Laurel Leff is Professor of Journalism and Associate Director of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University. Her book, Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (Yale University Press) was a finalist for a 2020 National Jewish Book Award. Her previous book, Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press) was chosen as the Best Media History Book of 2005 by the American Journalism Historians’ Association and Best History Book of 2005 by ForeWord Reviews. Leff was formerly a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald and an editor with American Lawyer Media Inc. and the Hartford Courant.