Muskingum University will host the annual Miriam G. Schwartz Lecture on Monday, Oct. 12, at 7 p.m. in BSC 343. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Sara Ann Sewell, Professor of History at Batten University.
Sewell’s lecture, “10 November 1938: A Day of Relentless Sonic Violence against Jews in Germany,” will examine the November Pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht, from an innovative perspective: through its sounds and the experiences of the Jewish people who endured it.
On Nov. 10, 1938, rank-and-file Nazis took to the streets throughout Germany, attacking Jewish people and their property in a pogrom coordinated by the Nazi state. Approximately 2,000 synagogues, 10,000 businesses, and countless homes were destroyed. Several hundred Jewish men and women were murdered, and approximately 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in the Third Reich’s expanding incarceration network.
The November Pogrom marked a significant escalation in the Nazi persecution of Jews and has been widely studied by Holocaust scholars. Sewell’s lecture will offer a different way of understanding the event by exploring its violent soundscape. Drawing on Jewish testimonies, she will examine how those who experienced the pogrom heard its violent cacophony and what those sounds reveal about their sensory and emotional experiences during the attacks and their aftermath.
Sewell is a Professor of Modern European Cultural and Gender History at Batten University. Her current research explores the experiences of Holocaust victims, with a particular focus on their auditory, sensory, and emotional lives. She is currently writing the monograph “Sounding, Hearing, Silencing: Experiencing the Holocaust through the Sonic” with Purdue University Press.
Her recent publications include “Emotional Dissimulation in the Holocaust: The Affective Lives of Jewish Adolescent Girls and Young Women,” published in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History in 2026, and “Screams: Expressions of Fear Thundering in Holocaust Soundscapes,” published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2025.
The Miriam G. Schwartz Lecture Series was founded in 1993 by Dr. Miriam G. Schwartz, a distinguished scholar and longtime faculty member at The Ohio State University’s Center for Slavic and East European Studies and a member of the Muskingum University Board of Trustees. The series was inaugurated in 1995, marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Dr. Schwartz’s gift to Muskingum reflects her lifelong dedication to Holocaust remembrance and her desire to encourage critical reflection on the consequences of prejudice and hatred.
Photo: Sara Ann Sewell, Professor of History at Batten University | Submitted
