Events

Making Global Connections

 Spring 2026 Programs

In person programs take place at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center unless noted otherwise. Events are free and open to all, but registration ahead of time is required and visitors must show ID upon entering the campus at Queensborough Community College (QCC). On site parking is available and for directions to QCC’s campus, please visit https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/about/index.html#gettingHere. For elevator access, enter the QCC Administration building and follow signs for the KHC.

Human Rights & the Museum Series (Online only)
Curation as Care
Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at 2:30pm EDT
Register to watch online: https://tinyurl.com/52breuhs

Join Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, for a discussion about the practice of community representation, engagement, and dialogue through the curation of historical and contemporary Native art in encyclopedic museums. Turner will address the concept of “curation as care” as it relates to her recent projects and her role in stewarding the Brooklyn Museum’s Indigenous art collection. She will also speak about the exhibition initiative she co-curated with Leila Grothe at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum,” the reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum’s American Art wing, and her collaboration with museum professionals and Indigenous knowledge keepers alike.

This event is part of the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center’s (KHC) Human Rights and the Museum Series, a collaboration between the KHC and the Museum and Gallery Studies Program in the Art and Design Department at Queensborough Community College (QCC). It is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University; the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Christopher Newport University; the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; the Holocaust, Genocide & Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University; the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University; and the Human Rights Institute at Kean University.

KHC-NEH Lecture (In Person & Online)
Finding Refuge at Bryn Mawr: The Exiled Mathematician Emmy Noether
Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 12:00pm EDT
Register to watch online: https://tinyurl.com/y3nf5ecc
Register to attend in person: https://tinyurl.com/yh3tahmk

On November 7, 1933, Emmy Noether, the most eminent woman mathematician in Europe, arrived in New York after she was dismissed from the University of Göttingen. Dr. Qinna Shen, Associate Professor of German at Bryn Mawr College and author of A Refugee Scholar from Nazi Germany: Emmy Noether and Bryn Mawr College (2019), will reconstruct the story of how Noether found refuge in the U.S. and share ongoing efforts by mathematicians and physicists to honor her.

This event is part of the 2025-26 Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.” It is co-sponsored by the Math and Computer Science Department at QCC; the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University; the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Christopher Newport University; the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; the Holocaust, Genocide & Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University; and the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University.

Faculty Workshop (Online)
‘What Would You Bring’: Narrating Difficult Histories in the Classroom
Friday, April 24, 2026, 12:00pm to 2:00pm EDT
Register to watch online: https://tinyurl.com/yzww64n4

Join Brooklyn-based playwright and producer Kendell Pinkney for a faculty training workshop that is part of What Would You Bring?, a Fall 2026 interdisciplinary writing initiative. What Would You Bring? invites students to narrate personal and familial histories of forced migration and to imagine the objects they might bring with them if they had to flee their homes. Drawing from his background in theatre, Pinkney will discuss how educators can create safe spaces for difficult conversations in the classroom and share techniques for facilitating deep listening among participants. Pinkney serves as Director of Jewish Learning and Artist-in-Residence for Reboot. He is also the founding Artistic Director of The Workshop, a New York-based arts and culture fellowship that supports the work of professional artists of BIPOC-Jewish heritage, including the online exhibition What Would You Bring?, a Reboot production which inspired this collaboration between the Kupferberg Holocaust Center & QCC’s English Department.

KHC-NEH Lecture (In Person & Online)
Varian Fry: The Audacious American Journalist Who Saved Europe’s Artists from the Nazis 
Tuesday, April 28, 2026 at 12:30pm EDT
Register to watch online: https://tinyurl.com/4b2anz4w
Register to attend in person: https://tinyurl.com/2nju9d9h

August 1940. In New York, the Emergency Rescue Committee forms to save European artists blacklisted by Hitler. But who will go to southern France to find the artists and do the rescuing? Enter Varian Fry, a New York journalist with deep knowledge of the European political situation but zero experience saving high profile would-be emigrés. How did Fry end up in this vital and delicate position? How did he find the artists on his list? Where did the artists hide while they awaited visas, and how did Fry help them negotiate the tangled red tape of wartime immigration? How did Fry’s time in Marseille affect the rest of his life? In this presentation, novelist and professor Julie Orringer will take you on a virtual journey to wartime Marseille and show you how one daring American achieved the impossible: the saving of more than two thousand artists, including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

This event is part of the 2025-26 Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.” It is co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University; the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Christopher Newport University; the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; the Holocaust, Genocide & Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University; the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University; the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at University of Nebraska at Omaha; the Holocaust Education & Resource Center at Kean University; and the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University.