In the late 1930s and early 1940s, tens of thousands of European Jews fleeing Nazi genocide found a temporary safe haven in Shanghai. They were able to do so because Shanghai was an open city under divided governance and because China was at war with Japan and could not exercise sovereign control over its borders. In this talk, Professor Lee ponders the moral lessons from this fortuitous episode of humanitarianism through the lens of moral philosophy and moral psychology, using the Canadian-Chinese writer Bella’s novel A Jewish Piano as her textual anchor.

Haiyan Lee is an associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 19001950 (2007), winner of the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, and The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (2014). In 201516, she was a Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences where she began research on a new project on Chinese visions of justice at the intersection of narrative, law, and ethics.

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.