Circuitous Exchanges

The KHC has served as a national demonstration site for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) since 2011. This recognition showcases the KHC as a cultural center that provides programs and offerings which positively impact QCC’s humanities curriculum and shares that information on a national level. For more information, click here.

2024-25 Colloquium

Circuitous Exchanges, the theme for the 2024-25 Kupferberg Holocaust Center-National Endowment for Humanities colloquium, focuses on the various exchanges that exist among historically oppressed and marginalized groups. Our use of the word exchanges refers to the connections, ideas, and creative productions shared among these groups. We use circuitous to emphasize that these connections, ideas, and creative productions are not always apparent, do not always travel from one direction to the other, and are often recursive in nature.

We center the lived experiences of these groups as they negotiate their outsider status with their host (or inhospitable) insider culture and devise ways to create a cultural identity regardless of their treatment. The events of Circuitous Exchanges build on the Kupferberg Holocaust Center’s mission to use the lessons of the Holocaust to educate current and future generations about the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping.

Fall 2024 Programs

KHC-NEH Lecture
Finding Home: Exploring the Cuban Jewish Experience in the Caribbean and the US
Recorded on October 30, 2024
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join us for a rich and powerful conversation surrounding Cuba’s long Jewish history with Dr. Ruth Behar, a cultural anthropologist and published children’s book author who has spent her career studying and sharing her own personal experience navigating her identity as a Cuban Jew. The discussion encompasses the ways in which Jewish immigrants reckoned with the creation of their new homes and identities as they migrated from Europe to the Caribbean and the US. 

KHC-NEH Lecture
Transportations of Terror and Trauma
Recorded on November 20, 2024
Click here to watch the recorded event

New World Slavery and the Holocaust were dependent upon the use of transportation systems, ships in terms of slavery and trains in terms of the Holocaust, to transport people to forced labor and death. Dr. Marcus Rediker, author of The Last Slave Ship, a Human History and Dr. Sarah Federman, author of Last Train to Auschwitz, discuss the interconnected roles these systems play in our memory of the atrocities and how they should be held accountable for their participation in these human tragedies.

KHC-NEH Lecture
The Holocaust and Hollywood Studios at Home and Abroad, 1933 to 1941
Recorded on December 4, 2024
Link to recorded event is forthcoming

As immigrant outsiders, Jews found ground-level entry into the burgeoning Hollywood film industry when other occupations barred them, while antisemites regularly singled out Hollywood for attack, alleging Jewish conspiracies and self-interest. Hollywood, reeling from the emergence of sound technology and the Great Depression, battled censorship domestically and abroad at a time when the public allowed overt intolerance directed toward marginalized ethnic groups. Featuring Dr. Steven Carr, Professor and Graduate Program Director of Communication and Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Purdue University Fort Wayne, and author of Hollywood and Antisemitism: A Cultural History up to World War II who discusses the complicated history of Jews in Hollywood.

2024-25 Faculty Fellows

This year’s Queensborough Community College KHC-NEH faculty fellows are Dr. Raquel Corona, Doctoral Lecturer in the English department; Dr. Julia Rothenberg, Associate Professor of Sociology; and Dr. Danny Sexton, Associate Professor of English, who have created a timely and thought-provoking set of programs.