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Other Past Events

March 5, 2024

Emerging Scholars Online Workshop: "Digital Humanities in Holocaust Studies: A Roadmap"

The Emerging Scholars series is led by and meant for MA Students, PhD Students, and Postdocs within two years of earning a degree in Holocaust Studies. This inaugural event provided participants with an introduction to various resources and pathways within Digital Humanities, specifically tailored for scholars in the field of Holocaust Studies. Speakers Emily Klein and Olga Kartashova shared their experiences doing work at the intersection of Digital Humanities and Holocaust Studies and presented a roadmap to guide workshop participants' exploration. 

February 11, 2024

Holocaust Studies, Terror, and War Series: "The Fraught Use of the Term Genocide Since 1945;" featuring Natalia Aleksiun, Dirk Moses, and Devin Pendas; moderated by Anika Walke

 

January 31, 2024

The Art of Betrayal: French Holocaust Film, Art Collecting, and the Mystery of French Jewish Identity

As Holocaust Studies has expanded across the disciplines, feature films have become increasingly important to classroom teaching and research. Imagining and interpreting events through vivid characterizations and images, films dramatize the circumstances as well as personal and public contradictions that underscored human suffering. Informed by the history of  the Jews in France during the Nazi occupation, Phyllis Lassner explored two French Holocaust films that portray Jewish art collecting as an activity that became a mechanism of hope for French Jews but also one of French collaboration. Along with discussion, film images and clips showed how the 1976 film Mr. Klein and the 2015 film The Art Dealer narrate stories of betrayed promises that question the nature of French Holocaust memory and the fate of French Jewish identity before, during, and after World War II.

 

November 19, 2023

Holocaust Studies, Terror, and War Series: "Holocaust Studies, Analytical Frameworks, and Understanding 7 October and Its Aftermath;" featuring Havi Dreifuss and James Loeffler, moderated by Avinoam Patt

 

April 6, 2023

Queering the Holocaust: Film Screening and Q&A with historian Anna Hájková (Warwick University)

This event featured a screening of the film The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman, based on interactions between Margot Heuman and Anna Hájková, the Warwick University historian who recorded their conversation in 2019. Directed by Erika Hughes, the play offers a poignant view of the coming of age of a Jewish queer woman in Nazi concentration camps.

 

September 21, 2022

Virtual Book Roundtable: More than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos

This virtual book event featured co-editors Jan Láníček and Jan Lambertz, and volume contributor Stefan Cristian Ionescu in conversation with Benjamin Frommer. It was co-sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.

 

April 3, 2022

The Weaponization of History and the Uses of Antisemitism in Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

This virtual roundtable about the Russian invasion of Ukraine featured Marta Havryshko (Ukranian National Academy of Sciences),  John-Paul Himka (University of Alberta), Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (Northwestern University), and Marci Shore (Yale University), and was moderated by Benjamin Frommer (Northwestern University). The event was sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, Penn State Behrend Department of History, Northwestern University Department of History, the Association for Jewish Studies Holocaust Division, and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. The discussion can be watched here.

 

November 19, 2021

Virtual Premiere Screening of Video Tribute to HEF Founder Theodore "Zev" Weiss

This special virtual program was held to mark the one year anniversary of Theodore "Zev" Weiss' passing.  The video tribute, produced by Northwestern University Media & Technology Innovation, is posted here on a Tribute Page to our founder.  The community is welcome to add a video tribute to this page as well.  Find out how, here.

 

April 20, 2021

Virtual Book Event -Anna Hájková's The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt

The virtual book event featured author, Anna Hájková (University of Warwick), in conversation with Jennifer Evans (Carleton University; member of the College of New Scholars, Royal Society of Canada), on The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. Watch the event here.

 

December 16, 2020

Lessons and Legacies XIV Virtual Book Launch

The webinar featured a roundtable that included co-editors Tim Cole (University of Bristol) and Simone Gigliotti (Royal Holloway, University of London) and volume contributors Anne K. Knowles (University of Maine) and Sharon Oster (University of Redlands); chaired by HEFNU Director Sarah M. Cushman (Northwestern University). Watch the event here.

 

February 6, 2020

COJOT - A Film by Boaz Dvir

Film screening and Q&A with Film Writer and Director, Boaz Dvir and Producer, Matthew Einstein 
Special guest, Lucas Cojot, a NU undergraduate student and Cojot’s grandson

Co-sponsors: Department of German, Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, Northwestern Hillel

This powerful rough-cut documentary tells the virtually unknown story of a Holocaust survivor who set out to kill his father’s Nazi executioner and ended up playing a key role in one of history’s most daring rescue operations (Entebbe, Uganda, 1976).

 

April 24, 2019 

Writing History, Writing Biography: Capturing H.G. Adler’s Many World’s

Peter Filkins, the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature and the Division Head of Languages and Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is an award-winning poet and translator, as well as author of  a  2019 biography of H.G. Adler: H.G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds (Oxford).H.G. Adler (1910 – 1988) lived at the center of his times and on their margin. A survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps, he chronicled his experience in two dozen books of seminal history, modernist fiction, formally intricate poems, and insightful essays. Despite close friendships with Leo Baeck, Elias Canetti, and Heinrich Böll, he remained a writer’s writer, largely unknown and neglected. Thus, the story of his life must be told through the times in which he lived, as well as how the same lived through him. Peter Filkins discussed the intersection of biography and history in shaping the story of Adler’s life and work.

This lecture wass presented by the German Department, and co-sponsored by the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, the Comparative Literary Studies Program, the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, the Weinberg College Office of the Dean, and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University.

 

March 6, 2018

Americans and the Holocaust: An Exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, along with the Department of History, celebrated the work of our colleague Daniel Greene, who curated an exhibition on Americans’ responses to the Holocaust at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Greene discussed the exhibition and his contributions to it.

 

January 30, 2018

The Criminalization of Kindness: Forced Migration and Sanctuary from World War II until the Present

The Holocaust Educational Foundation, in partnership with the Buffett Institute for Global Studies and the Department of History, presented a panel discussion, “The Criminalization of Kindness: Forced Migration and Sanctuary from World War II until the Present.” The panel featured three Northwestern professors: Galya Ben-Arieh, “Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Sanctions: Civilian Assistance for Refugees and State Responses in the U.S. and Italy,” Benjamin Frommer, “Emigration, Flight, and Internal Resettlement during the Holocaust,” and Lauren Stokes, “Sanctuary Evanston: Refugees in The Daily Northwestern, from the 1930s to Now.”

 

 November 2 and 7, 2017

Representing Queer Lives under Nazism: Two Films, Twenty Years

Aimee and Jaguar - Film Screening

Panel discussion

The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, in partnership with Northwestern Hillel, the Women’s Center, and the department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, presented a panel discussion, “Representing Queer Lives under Nazism: Two Films, Twenty Years.” The panel featured Northwestern Professors Sarah M. Cushman, Danny M. Cohen, and Phyllis Lassner discussing two films, Bent and Aimee and Jaguar, that focus on the lives of LGBT individuals during the Third Reich. 

 

May 26, 2017

Jews and Justice in Communist Poland in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, survivors and Jews the world over were anxious to see Nazis and their accomplices put on trial for their crimes. Poland’s surviving Jewish remnant played a particularly active role in the effort to bring Nazis and Nazi collaborators before the bar of justice. Gabriel Finder (University of Virginia) examined various ways in which Polish Jews participated in the pursuit of justice for the victims of Nazi-era crimes. Although Jews operated within constraints, not least of which were those brought to bear by Poland’s communist regime, they were resolved to become agents in the legal response to the Holocaust.

This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. 

 

April 19, 2017 

Trial by Documentary: The Harlans, from Jud Süss (1940) to Notre Nazi (1984)

In availing themselves of unconventional strategies and appealing to non-legal discourses, documentary films have exceptional latitude in critiquing the legal and judicial spheres. Brad Prager (University of Missouri) examined the 1984 documentary Notre Nazi, which was produced by Thomas Harlan, the son of the notorious Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, who was best known for directing the propaganda film Jud Süss (1940). In Thomas Harlan’s film Alfred Filbert, a former SS perpetrator, stands in for the elder Harlan, and the proceedings that take place in the film’s makeshift courtroom work through the German past by foregrounding all manner of affects, including filial ambivalence, shame, and rage.

This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. 

 

March 7, 2017

Confessional Performance and the Holocaust Perpetrator: Gitta Sereny’s 1971 Interview with Treblinka Commandant Franz Stangl

In this talk, Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis) investigated the ethical implications of Gitta Sereny’s journalistic biography Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1974).  The book is based on Sereny’s extensive interviews with Franz Stangl, who was then serving a life sentence for his role in the Holocaust.  McGlothlin analyzed Sereny’s intersubjective encounter with Stangl and her construction of his experience as one of ethical epiphany.

This lecture was presented by the Department of German and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. 

 

April 13, 2016  Evanston Public Library

 

The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne

Anna Bikont’s book The Crime and the Silence tells the story of the July 1941 massacre of Jews in the Eastern Polish towns of Jedwabne and Radziłów, where local Poles rounded up their Jewish neighbors and burned them in a barn. She investigated the long silence in the years following these events, and the fierce debate initiated in Poland by historian Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbors. The debate broke some of the taboos central to the Polish sense of identity, but left many untouched, among them the anti-Semitism prevalent in the Catholic Church before, during, and after WW II and the scale of these crimes. She spoke about the events of 1941, telling the story of Stanislaw Ramotowski, one of the main characters in the book, and about the present-day impact of the Jedwabne massacre in Poland.

Anna Bikont is a nonfiction writer and a journalist for  Gazeta Wyborcza, a major Polish newspaper which she helped found in 1989. Her book The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of the Jews in Wartime Jedwabne, published in 2015 by FSG, was selected  as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the editors of New York Times and won a National Jewish Book Award.

The Evanston Public Library partners regularly with Northwestern. They host an ongoing Northwestern Humanities Lecture series from the Alice Kaplan Institute, and Northwestern faculty have contributed to the Mission Impossible classics and Muslim Journeys book discussions. The library welcomes Northwestern students, staff, and faculty.

 

October 15, 2014, Evanston Public Library

Who Owns Anne Frank in the 21st Century? 

A brand-new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank is now meeting with success on stage in Amsterdam.  We are expecting two new Anne Frank movies and historians are working on two new scholarly editions of Anne’s work. Why then are the two different Anne Frank Foundations in Basel and Amsterdam fighting with each other?David Barnouw explored the contentious legacy of Anne Frank and her diaries in our time.

Dr. David Barnouw is a Dutch historian and an emeritus researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A writer, speaker, and scholar, Barnouw is a recognized expert on Anne Frank and World War Two in the Netherlands. He has appeared in multiple documentary films and his writings are frequently published by the Dutch and international media. Barnouw is the editor of The Diary of Anne Frank: the Revised Critical Edition.

The Evanston Public Library partners regularly with Northwestern on programming. They host an ongoing Northwestern Humanities Lecture series from the Alice Kaplan Institute, and Northwestern faculty have contributed to the Mission Impossible classics and Muslim Journeys book discussions. The library welcomes Northwestern students, staff and faculty.