Please join us on Monday, May 13th at 5pm in Swift 201 for a lecture by:

Professor Ben Ratskoff

Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish History and Culture, Hebrew Union College

A Tale of Two Revisions: The Color Line and the Jewish Problem, From Galicia to Dougherty County

In April 16, 1952, Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech at the “Tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters” event organized by Jewish Life magazine, a monthly published by the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO) since 1946. In this speech, Du Bois argued that his travels through Poland and “discovery of the Jewish question” there forced him to reevaluate and revise his canonical thesis that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” A year later, Du Bois made five minor revisions to the text of The Souls of Black Folk for the 1953 Jubilee Edition, all of which addressed references to avaricious Jewish capitalists in the Black Belt. This paper will interrogate this extraordinary revisionary process in which Du Bois, at such a late stage in his career and amidst the Cold War Red Scare, was compelled to reconsider and refine his understanding of antisemitism and its relationship to the color line — both in new and old writings.

For those interested, the lecture will focus on Du Bois’s essay, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” which can be downloaded here: Du Bois_Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto (Jewish Life)