Interrogating Neutrality during the Holocaust

Call for Applications

July 7–18, 2025 Application deadline: February 14, 2025 Applications must be submitted in English via our online application.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum invites applications for the 2025 Moskowitz/Rafalowicz International Research Workshop Interrogating Neutrality during the Holocaust. The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Danielle Sanchez, Colorado College. The workshop is scheduled for July 7–18, 2025, and will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This workshop focuses on the ways individuals, communities, and nations grappled with the concept of neutrality before, during, and after the Holocaust. The Museum’s special exhibition, Americans and the Holocaust, emphasizes one of the most important political and intellectual debates of the mid-twentieth century: whether the country would directly confront the rising tide of fascism and antisemitism of the 1930s. The America First movement united individuals from a variety of ideological positions, but they all shared a desire to remain neutral in the face of growing fascism and antisemitism. Similar debates in neutral European countries, both democracies and dictatorships, profoundly shaped the fates of Jews desperately seeking safe passage and refuge from Nazi persecution.

While neutrality has often been framed as a response to geopolitical conflict, its limitations—especially in the context of the Holocaust and World War II—require deeper exploration beyond Western Europe and the United States. This workshop thus seeks to bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to engage with the concept of neutrality, its various manifestations, its limitations, and its consequences in the lead up to and during World War II and the Holocaust.

The aim of this workshop is to foster conversations that unpack the limitations of the term neutrality, critically analyze the philosophies and ethics surrounding it, and explore whether neutrality is even possible—especially during an event like the Holocaust. What are the limitations of the term neutrality?  How can we critically analyze the philosophies and ethics surrounding neutrality? What practical, ethical, and historical challenges arise from neutrality during and after the Holocaust?  How did neutrality function—or fail to function—across different contexts during the Holocaust and its aftermath?  

We seek to engage with case studies of neutrality during the Holocaust and World War II, assessing the practical, ethical, and historical challenges that arise. Together, we will reflect on how neutrality functioned (or failed) across different contexts and whether it served as a valid position or an illusory ideal in moments of crisis.

We invite applications that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:  

• Case studies of neutrality policies and their impact during the Holocaust in under-researched regions

• Neutrality and occupation

• Neutrality in propaganda

• Neutrality and collaboration

• The political economy of neutrality

• Comparative approaches to neutrality across nations, communities, and individuals

• Transnational debates on neutrality

• The ideological, political, and social justifications for neutrality during the Holocaust.  

• The role of neutrality in shaping collective memory and postwar narratives

• Ethical dilemmas of neutrality: compliance, resistance, and complicity in the face of atrocity

• Theoretical explorations of neutrality as a concept in political philosophy, critical theory, anthropology, sociology, and history

Daily sessions of the workshop will consist of presentations and roundtable discussions led by participants, as well as discussions with Museum staff and research in the Museum’s collections. The workshop will be conducted in English.

Museum Resources

The Museum's David M. Rubenstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation houses an unparalleled repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The Museum’s comprehensive collection contains millions of documents, artifacts, photos, films, books, and testimonies. The Museum’s Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names contains records on people persecuted during World War II under the Nazi regime. In addition, the Museum possesses the holdings of the International Tracing Service (ITS), which contains more than 200 million digital images of documentation on millions of victims of Nazism—people arrested, deported, killed, put to forced labor and slave labor, or displaced from their homes and unable to return at the end of the war. Many of these records have not been examined by scholars, offering unprecedented opportunities to advance the field of Holocaust and genocide studies.

The Museum’s related collections include:

• Records from various ministries and other governmental agencies of countries that remained neutral for all or part of World War II, including Argentina, Ireland, Portugal and its colonies, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Vatican

• Diplomatic correspondence related to Turkey

• Records relating to officials who leveraged neutrality in their efforts to rescue Jews, such as Per Anger, Julius Kühl, Carl Lutz, Albert Nussbaum, and Giorgio Perlasca

• Records of international aid organizations that maintained a position of neutrality, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, or that coordinated rescue and relief operations with neutral countries, such as the World Jewish Congress, the American Friends Service Committee, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

• Rare books from the 1930s and ‘40s reflecting debates about neutrality

• Oral histories of refugees and survivors who transited through or found refuge in neutral countries

Participants will have access to both the Museum’s downtown campus and the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center in Bowie, MD. To search the Museum's collections, please visit collections.ushmm.org/search.

Application Details

Applications are welcome from scholars affiliated with universities, research institutions, or memorial sites and in any relevant academic discipline, including but not limited to history, literature, philosophy, political science, religion, and sociology. Applications are encouraged from scholars at all levels of their careers, from Ph.D. candidates to senior faculty. 

The Mandel Center will reimburse the costs of round-trip economy-class air tickets to/from the Washington, D.C. metro area, and related incidental expenses, up to a maximum reimbursable amount calculated by home institution location, which will be distributed within 6–8 weeks of the workshop’s conclusion. The Mandel Center will also provide hotel accommodation for the duration of the workshop. Participants are required to attend the full duration of the workshop and to circulate a draft paper in advance of the program.

The deadline for receipt of applications is February 14, 2025. Applications must include:

• A short biography

• A curriculum vitae

• A list of any related publications and/or on-going research projects

• An abstract of no more than 500 words outlining the specific project that the applicant plans to research and is prepared to present during the program.

Applications must be submitted in English via our online application.

Admission will be determined without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender (sexual orientation or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or reprisal. The Museum also prohibits any form of workplace discrimination or harassment.

Questions should be directed to researchworkshops@ushmm.org.

This workshop has been made possible through the generosity of the Moskowitz/Rafalowicz Endowment at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.