Capturing the Unspeakable: Art as a Tool in Learning About the Holocaust
March 17, 2022 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Over 30,000 works of art survived the Holocaust; they serve as eyewitness sources as well as enabling our subjective and emotional understanding. In this talk, Dr. Laura Morowitz explores works of art created in hiding, ghettos and concentration camps, revealing how they can serve as a unique tool in teaching and learning about the Holocaust.
Talk by Dr. Laura Morowitz, Professor of Art History at Wagner College, New York, and Senior Research and Programming Assistant at the Wagner College Holocaust Center. Laura Morowitz’s scholarship has focused on a variety of places and questions in European Modernism and currently focuses on issues of art in Nazi Vienna. She is the author of Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (with Will Vaughan), Ashgate 2000, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siecle France (with Elizabeth Emery), Ashgate 2003, and The Miracles of Prato (with Laurie Lico Albanese), William Morrow/Harper Collins 2009
The Art of Survival: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Children’s Art at Theresienstadt
April 14, 2022 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Bauhaus-trained artist and designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944) brought the philosophies of progressive art education to the NSDAP ghetto and concentration camp at Theresienstadt, teaching drawing to imprisoned children, mostly girls, to inspire hope and self-expression under the most adverse conditions. While most of “Friedl’s girls” ultimately perished, Dicker-Brandeis’s surviving students spoke of their teacher’s remarkable ability to create a nurturing atmosphere where students could express hopes, fears and dreams as a temporary release from the brutal ghetto around them. Examining Dicker-Brandeis’s intellectual influences in Secessionist Vienna and the Weimar Bauhaus, Dr. Brandow-Faller’s talk focuses on Dicker-Brandeis’s brief but heroic teaching and exhibition career in the children’s homes of Theresienstadt, where art became a means of humanistic, if not physical, survival for its youngest inhabitants.
Talk by Dr. Megan Brandow-Faller, Professor of History at the City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough. Dr. Brandow-Faller’s research focuses on art and design in Secessionist and interwar Vienna, including children’s art and artistic toys of the Vienna Secession; expressionist ceramics of the Wiener Werkstätte; folk art and modernism; and women’s art education. She is the editor of Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-present (Bloomsbury 2018) and the author of The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy (Penn State University Press, 2020). Dr. Brandow-Faller is a member of the Kingsborough Holocaust Advisory Board and also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center.
“Ordinary People”: Heroes for Hiding Jews – Organized by the Wagner College Holocaust Center in Partnership with the Kingsborough Holocaust Center
April 28 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Location: Foundation Hall Manzulli Board Room, Wagner College
Of the approximately 159,000 Jews in the Netherlands before World War II, an estimated 25,000 men, women, and children went into hiding, including 3 1/2 year old Leo Ullman.
Mr. Ullman will present his and his family’s personal experiences, which are also chronicled in his book, “796 Days” and a film, “There Were Good People Doing Extraordinary Deeds…Leo Ullman’s Story”.
A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School and Business School, Mr. Ullman has had a long and successful career as a lawyer and real estate entrepreneur. Mr. Ullman is profoundly devoted to promoting Holocaust education, including serving many years as Chairman of the Anne Frank Center, USA, and presently as Chairman of the Foundation for the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, Inc.
Visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, in New York City
April 29, 2022 @ 11:30 am
The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is New York’s contribution to the global responsibility to never forget. The Museum is committed to the crucial mission of educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust.
As a place of memory, the Museum enables Holocaust survivors to speak through recorded testimony and draws on rich collections to illuminate Jewish history and experience. As a public history institution, it offers intellectually rigorous and engaging exhibitions, programs, and educational resources.
Screening of Who Will Write Our History & Discussion with the Film Maker
May 10, 2022 @2:00pm – 3:00pm
Who Will Write Our History is a 90-minute documentary film about Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, the secret archive he created and led in the Warsaw Ghetto. The film, written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman is based on the book of the same name by historian Samuel Kassow. On May 10 @2:00pm, Dr. Elke Weesjes (Research Director of the Holocaust Center) will facilitate a Zoom Q & A with Roberta Grossman.
