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Uppsala — your decision is difficult to understand.
Please explain

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How remarkable does it sound: two jewish names of significant Swedish historians are now gone at Uppsala University?!

End 2023 and in the beginning of 2024, the Initiative asked Uppsala University to place a plaque in honor of historian Paul A. Levine on the walls of The Hugo Valentine Center (HVC), where the Jewish-American-Swedish Holocaust historian Paul A. Levine was a co-founder. Levine successfully championed the development of this institute for decades.

With Paul A. Levine at the helm, the HVC stood as the leading institution in Holocaust studies and education throughout Sweden. Both Levine’s achievement and HVC’s significance are well-documented and widely recognized. Not least for this reason after Levine’s passing, the Initiative “Paul A. Levine Library” requested that the HVC places a commemorative plaque at the institution in Levine’s honor . The response? A curt dismissal: “We do not plan…”

Now that we see their plans laid out in David Stavrou Kay’s article in הארץ, the deeper, unsettling question remains: What does it say—about Swedish society today and the shaping of historical memory—that Uppsala University has erased two prominent Jewish names from its surface? Is this mere academic restructuring, or a reflection of something more troubling in Sweden’s reckoning with its past and present?

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P.S.: Read about the project “A Traveling Tombstone” in memory of Paul A. Levine:

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