Ida Richter, M.A.

Ida Richter’s research focuses on the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration as well as the history of human rights and international criminal law. She studied political science and human rights at Sciences Po Paris and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. An article resulting from her master’s thesis has been published in the Journal of International Criminal Justice in 2020. Ida Richter’s PhD dissertation, written in the framework of a research group on Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Nations at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technical University Berlin, inquired into universalistic rhetoric in the commemoration of rescue during the Holocaust, taking the example of Raoul Wallenberg’s reception history from 1945 to the 1990s. In Munich, she will work on a central aspect of a new research project on Western activism on behalf of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 1980s.

Research Project

Claims to Universality in the Late Cold War: Intersections of Human Rights Discourse and Holocaust Memory in Western Activism on Behalf of Soviet Jewry

While both the phenomenon of the “universalization of the Holocaust” and the upsurge of the concept of human rights from the late 1970s on have attracted great interest in research in recent years, the discursive connection between the Holocaust and human rights in the 1970s and 1980s remains largely unexplored. Ida Richter’s project sheds light on how this connection might have crystalized in activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the United States and Western Europe at that time, taking the case of the British activist group “Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry.” This group, also known as the “35s,” campaigned from the early 1970s on for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate and was known for its media effective protest forms, as well as for its reliable information on the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, published in weekly circulars. The project will analyze how the group framed its work in terms of human rights and from when on and for which purposes members of the group made references to the Holocaust concerning their engagement on behalf of Soviet Jews.