For the last four decades, Sonoma State University’s annual lecture series on the Holocaust and genocide has held an important place in Northern California’s Jewish community, preserving the legacy of Holocaust victims and educating students about the horrors of antisemitism and other forms of hatred.
In the past two years, though, the influential series has taken up a new area of inquiry: Israel.
The spring series presents weekly talks that are free and open to the public. Among last year’s and this year’s speakers are two who accuse Israel of genocide. One, Ussama Makdisi, is a staunch critic who wrote recently that since 1948, Israel has treated Palestinians with “meticulous cruelty that touches every aspect of Palestinian life.” The other, Brown University historian Omer Bartov, gained widespread notice last year after the New York Times published his op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
The Sonoma State Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series is described as the “cornerstone” of the university’s Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a multidisciplinary institution. It was founded as the Holocaust Studies Center by John Steiner, an Auschwitz survivor and renowned sociologist who conducted interviews with Nazi perpetrators. The first lecture took place in 1983.
Throughout most of the 1980s and into the ’90s, the center’s stated purpose was to provide “education about the origins, nature and consequences of the Holocaust,” according to its website. A promotional poster in 1984 advertised nine lectures, among them “The Holocaust and the Roots of Evil” and “Catastrophe and the Jewish Experience.”
In 2003, the center changed its name to include genocide studies. “This is not a small move,” an announcement in a university magazine said. “It indicates to the community that the Center is not just focusing on the Jewish experience, but is recognizing the Holocaust as a template for other mass murders.”
Even before the name change, the lecture series had expanded to include genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Americas and elsewhere. The series has welcomed dozens of Holocaust survivors to relate their experiences, as well as survivors of the Rwandan, Cambodian and Bosnian genocides. Particularly over the last 10 to 15 years, the participation of Holocaust survivors has dwindled considerably as their numbers decline. Supporters of the series described it as an institution with deep roots in the Sonoma County Jewish community.
This year, just four of the 15 lecture topics pertain to the Holocaust. Two deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The rest cover Armenia, Native Americans, Guatemala, the Japanese occupation of China during World War II and other topics.
J. recently interviewed six supporters of the speakers’ series, including family members of Holocaust survivors, community lecturers and donors. Some expressed complicated feelings about the program’s new direction; they support academic freedom but don’t want to see the series politicized. Others expressed outrage, saying the decision to include Makdisi and Bartov was an affront to the original mission to memorialize and study the Holocaust, honor its victims and combat antisemitism.
“Up until last year, it has always been about recognized genocides,” said Miriam Wald, a retired clinical psychologist who is involved with Holocaust remembrance in Sonoma County. “It’s never been about current political situations.” Indeed, Wald said, Holocaust victims would be “rolling over in their mass graves if they knew the direction that things are going.”
“We had these incredible, incredible survivors who historically were very involved in the development of this lecture series, and this relationship to the university,” she said. “It was really precious to the Jewish community, and we cherished it all so much.”
Wald said the changes have led to painful disputes within the local Jewish community. She sits on an eight-member Yom HaShoah committee that organizes an annual commemoration in Sonoma County. This year, the committee voted to stop promoting the lecture series once Bartov was invited.
The lectures are required for about 100 students who take the upper-level course “Perspectives on the Holocaust and Genocide” and also fulfill general-education requirements. Wald said the series is now “indoctrinating” students into anti-Israel positions that make Jews less safe.
The accusation that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza is “a very popular topic right now among people who don’t actually understand the history of Israel,” said Michelle Zygielbaum, who endowed a fund to support the event after the death of her mother-in-law, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps. “They don’t understand the history of Palestine, of Gaza, of Hamas, and who Hamas is.”
Concerned supporters of the series describe the annual event as a beloved and vital institution but wonder about balance — for example, why there was no lecture interrogating Hamas’ crimes on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 people were murdered and 251 were taken hostage in the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
“They’re criticizing Israel, but not looking at the other side of what’s going on,” said Dennis Judd of Sebastopol, who on Feb. 17 delivered a lecture about his mother’s experience at Auschwitz.
Judd, who has donated money to support the series, said he had mixed feelings about the inclusion of voices accusing Israel of genocide. For years, he said, the lecture series was “pretty much nonpolitical. It was education about the history of what happened.”
Judd said the inclusion of Makdisi and Bartov suggested a political preference on a hugely controversial topic.
“As soon as it gets political, then it becomes a question of, is this the place for it? I’m not sure it is. Is a Holocaust and genocide program really the forum for this to happen?” he said. “If you’re going to go political, show different viewpoints.”
History professor Stephen Bittner, the academic coordinator of the series, did not respond to an interview request for this story. Speaking with J. last year, Bittner defended the inclusion of speakers known for their harsh criticism of Israel, citing academic freedom. In light of the polarizing discourse around the Israel-Hamas war, he said at the time, sessions dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are vitally important to the series. Whether students agree or disagree with the speakers “does not matter to me,” he said.
Bittner said his decisions were motivated in part by the turmoil that erupted on Sonoma State’s campus during the 2023-2024 school year. Students formed a tent encampment in the spring of 2024 protesting the Gaza war, some explicitly linking their activism to the Holocaust, using phrases like “Never Again for Anyone.” The president of the university, Mike Lee, became a casualty of the political moment; he was placed on leave after acceding to some of the protesters’ demands, and then he retired.
“Anybody who thinks that we don’t have Zionist voices in our lecture series clearly hasn’t looked at our roster of speakers,” Bittner said last year. “We have several speakers who openly identify as Zionist and as sympathetic to the State of Israel.”
Bittner said he was confident that conversations in the series would not devolve into political disputes. “I can’t be certain that that will be true in every other venue on campus,” he said. “What we do in the classroom is not about politics. It’s about learning.”
The lecture series interprets “genocide broadly to mean not just places where accepted genocide is occuring,” Bittner said, “but places where genocide might occur, or where there is some dispute about whether genocide occurred.”
Bittner was responding to questions about Makdisi, a Palestinian American scholar of Arab history and a professor at UC Berkeley who in 2024 was named chair of UC Berkeley’s newly formed Palestinian and Arab Studies program.
“My invitation is for Ussama to speak regardless of his point of view. I invited him because he’s a respected scholar,” Bittner said last year.
Makdisi delivered his lecture “Atonement at the Expense of Others: Palestinians and the Question of Genocide” on April 15. He said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and argued that the Zionist movement benefited from European guilt about the Holocaust at the expense of Palestinians. Hundreds of people attended online and in person, and Makdisi received a standing ovation.
This year, the series will host Bartov, an Israeli American genocide scholar who became influential in the public debate surrounding Israel’s actions in the Israel-Hamas war after the publication of his essay. In it, he presented evidence of genocide in statements made by Israeli leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pledged to turn areas of Gaza where Hamas is operating “into rubble” — coupled with the scale of destruction. He will give a lecture on May 5 called “Israel: What Went Wrong?”
The allegation of genocide is firmly rejected by Israel and bitterly disputed among experts. Throughout the course of the war, Israel said the aim of its military campaign in Gaza was to destroy Hamas and free hostages captured by the terrorist group. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, more than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed. A U.S.-brokered agreement in October requiring Hamas to release the last 20 living hostages held by Hamas in Gaza was instrumental in ending the most intense fighting of the war.
Last August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution affirming that Israel had committed genocide. Some criticized IAGS because of relatively low voter participation and lax criteria for scholars to gain admission to the professional association. Days later, a group called Scholars for Truth About Genocide published a rebuttal to the IAGS statement, saying it neglected Hamas’ role in the destruction in Gaza, including its use of human shields and its refusal to release civilian hostages.
The genocide claim was a “clear misapplication of law history,” the rebuttal said. “Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence.”
Lev Luvishis, a technology professional in Santa Rosa whose great-grandmother was killed in the Holocaust, is a vocal supporter of Israel. Over the past two years, he led Run for Our Lives events in Sonoma County to raise awareness about hostages held in Gaza. He described the inclusion of speakers who accuse Israel of genocide as a “moral issue.”
Luvishis has attended the lecture series over the years, he said, in part because of his daughter. She met Hans Angress, a Holocaust survivor and a regular presenter at the lecture series, when she was in high school. Angress, who died in 2021, was a hidden child whose father was sent to Auschwitz and killed during the Holocaust. When Luvishis’ daughter went on an organized trip to visit the concentration camps in Poland, Angress gave her a stone to leave at Auschwitz in memory of his father. Luvishis said his family has been closely connected to the series since.
“To me what they’re doing is just diluting that word,” Luvishis said, describing the genocide claim as a “blood libel” and a lie. “They’re basically trying to portray Israel as the worst — as an entity that’s committing the worst crimes in humanity, and calling it genocide. To me that’s just an attempt to dehumanize Israel, delegitimize Israel. And I don’t think it has any place in this series.”