Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis

Debórah Dwork presents "Saints and Liars: The Story of Americans Who Saved Refugees from the Nazis" as the keynote speaker for the Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series in the Study of Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide.

Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center—CUNY. Internationally renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field. As the inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, she changed the academic landscape, envisioning and actualizing doctoral training in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

Her book, Saints and Liars (W.W. Norton: January, 2025) is about Americans – Quakers, Unitarians, Jews – who traveled abroad to aid and, step by step, turned to rescuing people targeted by Nazi Germany and other racist states.

​The Dr. Harold Abel Endowed Lecture Series in the Study of Dictatorship, Democracy and Genocide invites to campus distinguished scholars to discuss the past, present and future of worldwide genocide. ​The series focuses on the impact of historical events such as the Holocaust and mass murders in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central America.

The endowed lecture series was established in 2009 through a $100,000 gift by the family of Dr. Harold Abel to honor and memorialize his 44-year career as an educator, which included a 10-year term as president of Central Michigan University from 1975 to 1985. Dr. Abel died in 2002.