Simo Muir's talk at UCL, 2016, as part of lecture series organised by Institute or Jewish Studies  

Date	4th February 2016
URL	https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ijs/ijs-events-publication/jews-in-finland-during-world-war-two
Format	Website

An event associated with Performing the Jewish Archive research.

The history of the Jews in Finland during WWII is unusual. Between 1941 and 1944, when Finland joined Germany in the assault against the Soviet Union, Jews found themselves as brothers-in-arms with Nazi Germans. Though living under fear of deportations, Finland’s indigenous Jewish population escaped the Holocaust. Simo Muir will tell this story from a historical and cultural perspective focusing also on the unique Yiddish- and Swedish-speaking cultural scene during this peculiar period.

Simo Muir is a postdoctoral research fellow in the project “Performing the Jewish Archive” at the University of Leeds. He received his M.A. in Yiddish Studies at SOAS and his Ph.D. in Yiddish linguistics at the University of Helsinki in 2004, and has published widely on Jewish history in Finland, Jewish–Finnish relations, and latent antisemitism in Finland in the 1930s. Between 2010 and 2014 he was a researcher in the Finnish Academy-funded project “Cultures of Silence,” which focused on Finnish historiography of the Holocaust. He is a contributing co-editor of "Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History" (2013).

Image: Finnish-Jewish Brothers-in-Arms Association c. 1943.