Making Global Connections

Fall 2025 Event Recordings

Holocaust Memory & Jewish Identity in Latin America & the Caribbean Series
“Una Cosa Viva”: The Futures of Holocaust Memory and Meaning in Argentina
Recorded on November 6, 2025
Link to recorded event is forthcoming

Argentina–home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America–is a nation with multiple histories of violence and loss, including the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society, which still remains in a state of impunity over thirty years later. In recent years, new challenges have also resituated the significance of Holocaust memory for imagining and reimagining Jewish Argentine futures. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Dr. Natasha Zaretsky, author of Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2021), explores new generations of Holocaust memory and their significance for democracy and the public sphere.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Albert Einstein: Refugee, Activist and Humanitarian
Recorded on October 28, 2025
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In 1933, with almost twenty years of service as professor at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and researcher at Humbolt University of Berlin, and under targeted threat from the Nazi regime, Albert Einstein fled Germany. With the aid of the Academic Assistance Council, he and his family took refuge first in Belgium, then England, before his appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In this presentation, Michael Shara, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) professor and curator of the 2002 landmark AMNH exhibit, “Einstein,” discusses Einstein’s experiences as a refugee and his political and humanitarian activism. 

LGBTQIA+ Consortium Collaboration
Beyond All Binaries: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the German-Jewish Queer Rights Activist Who Took On the Nazis
Recorded on October 22, 2025
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In a world where most saw binaries of “us” and “them,” Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld saw humanity as a seamless continuum of “we.” Applying this insight first to sexual orientation, then to gender, and finally to race, Hirschfeld worked to rally the world against rising fascism. Nearly a century after the Nazis burned his archive and drove him from Berlin, Hirschfeld’s outlook has much to teach us as we face down book bans and weaponized xenophobia today. The event features Daniel Brook, author of The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin (Norton & Co., 2025). This event was part of a special collaboration between the KHC and Queensborough Community College’s LGBTQIA+ Consortium; English Department; Communication, Theatre, & Media Production Department; and PRIDE Center.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Poetry of Witness and Resistance: A Conversation with Ilya Kaminsky
Recorded on October 21, 2025
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Join us for a conversation with acclaimed poet Ilya Kaminsky, whose poems bear witness to our times and create a space for empathy and compassion in resistance to oppression. Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).

KHC-NEH Professional Development Workshop
An Introduction to Discussion-Based Pedagogy of Transformative Texts
Recorded on October 17, 2025
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In this interactive zoom workshop, Queensborough Community College English department members Ilse Schrynemakers and Susan Lago introduce participating colleagues to the discussion-based pedagogy of the Great Questions Foundation, founded by faculty at Austin Community College. Both Dr. Schrynemakers and Professor Lago are in their second year of a Faculty Fellowship with the Great Question Foundation. They share the philosophy and student engagement strategies to help stimulate and facilitate meaningful class discussions for faculty who are teaching about the texts, academics, and artists featured in the 2025-26 KHC-NEH colloquium and/or are interested in learning about the Great Questions Foundation approach.

Holocaust Memory
The Impetus to Remember: Holocaust Memorials Erected by Jewish Burial Societies
Recorded on October 16, 2025
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At the end of WWII, Jewish burial societies (landsmanshaften) often created memorials in cemeteries to honor the memories of their families and towns destroyed during the Holocaust. Join us for a conversation about the history of the landsmanshaften, as well as an exploration of how burial societies at the Mount Hebron Cemetery in New York City became the only remaining pieces left of these original communities. The event features Susannah Trubman, Learning and Media Center Educator at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; Adam Ginsberg, President of Mount Hebron Cemetery; and Deirdre Poulos, Director of the Mount Hebron Legacy Foundation.

Human Rights & Museum Series
From Częstochowa to Bayside: The Story of the KHC’s Torah Scroll
Recorded on September 17, 2025
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In 1988, while visiting Częstochowa, Poland, Harry Rapaport made a remarkable discovery: a trove of Torah scrolls hidden in the attic of a wartime factory that had previously been a Jewish ritual bathhouse. Although heavily damaged, these religious artifacts are a living memorial to the local Jewish communities who perished during the Holocaust. Come learn about how one of these scrolls found its way to the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, and the yearlong process involved to both restore and remount this powerful historical artifact.

2024-25 Event Recordings

Holocaust Memory/Annual Yom HaShoah Commemoration
Annual Rabbi Isidoro Aizenberg Memorial Lecture
Raising the Stakes: Assessing the Impact of Rising Antisemitism on Holocaust Education
Recorded on April 24, 2025
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In commemoration of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dr. Oren Stier, Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust & Genocide Studies Program in the Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, discusses the implications for Holocaust education in the face of rising antisemitism, the impact of the October 7 terrorist attack, and the changing political landscape in the US and across the globe. This event was underwritten by the Yehoshua and Edna Aizenberg Holocaust Memorial Fund.

Special Partner Program
The Stories We Could Tell: Totalitarianism and Inhumanity in the Cambodian Genocide
Recorded on April 25, 2025
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Drawing on his March 2016 role as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia and many years of research in the country, Dr. Alex Hinton explores the entanglement of totalitarianism and inhumanity in the Cambodian genocide – and how we can speak out against it. Hinton is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. He is the award-winning author or editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021), Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell, 2022), and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford, 2023). This lecture was organized by the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University and co-sponsored by the KHC. 

KHC-NEH & “Unseen Threads” Lecture
Communicating Atrocity: Memorializing Traumatic Histories
Recorded on April 2, 2025
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Across the globe, memorial museums have been created as living spaces to commemorate and educate the public about past atrocities. Join Dr. Amy Sodaro, author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (2018) and Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race and Slavery in US Museums (2025), as she explores the interconnections between the Holocaust museum paradigm and institutions established to memorialize slavery and racial terrorism in the US.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Nothing About Us Without Us: Understanding the Disability Rights Movement
Recorded on March 12, 2025
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Approximately five hundred million persons throughout the world have physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. Join James I. Charlton, scholar, activist, and author of Nothing About Us Without Us, for a discussion about historical and contemporary disability oppression and empowerment, which builds upon interviews he conducted over a ten-year period with disability rights activists throughout the world.  

KHC-NEH Lecture
Flight and Survival: Jewish Refugees in Mexico in the Holocaust
Recorded on February 18, 2025
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In the 1930s and the 1940s of the 20th century, the Mexican government, like many other Latin American governments, imposed severe restrictions on the entry of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism into the country. Legal and political criteria combined to make it so that Jews, many of whom had family members living in Mexico, had to wait several months or even years in Europe before being able to emigrate, while others never obtained visas and perished in the Holocaust. Join Dr. Yael Siman, Professor of Social and Political Sciences at the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City, for a discussion about the experiences of those who, despite these enormous obstacles, managed to reach Mexico, as well as the many ways they adapted upon arrival. 

Special Partner Program
Allyship and Religious Freedom: Jews, Muslims, and Others 
Recorded on January 31, 2025
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Democracy is a system of governance that upholds the principles of equality, participation, and individual rights. A fundamental aspect of democratic societies is the freedom of religion, which allows individuals to practice, change, or abstain from religious beliefs without fear of persecution or discrimination. This freedom fosters a pluralistic environment where diverse faiths coexist, encouraging dialogue and mutual respect among different communities. By protecting faith communities and showing allyship we can continue to practice our democracy through Jewish-Muslim cooperation and building community. Join Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University, as she discusses her work and how civic discourse and engagement through acknowledging one another’s status as minority religious groups is possible.

This lecture was organized by the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University. It was co-sponsored by the Kupferberg Holocaust Center; the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Purdue University Fort Wayne; and the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at Fried Academy.

Holocaust Memory
2025 Holocaust Remembrance Day: Exhibiting the Holocaust in Memorial Museums
Recorded on January 27, 2025
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January 27, 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. With so few survivors and eyewitnesses left to share their stories of survival and resilience, Holocaust memorial museums will become even more critical educational spaces. In commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, join Dr. Amy Sodaro, author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (2018), for a discussion about the evolving ways in which the Holocaust is represented in museums and the challenges ahead in communicating this history to new generations.

Human Rights and the Museum Series
Regarding Repatriation: Museums and Native Communities Today
Recorded on December 11, 2024
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Join us for a conversation about the 2024 revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), including its effects on museums and Native communities featuring Danyelle Means, Director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, NM and co-curator of the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center’s (KHC) 2019-20 exhibition, Survivance and Sovereignty on Turtle Island: Engaging with Contemporary Native American Art.

KHC-NEH Lecture
The Holocaust and Hollywood Studios at Home and Abroad, 1933 to 1941
Recorded on December 4, 2024
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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.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Transportations of Terror and Trauma
Recorded on November 20, 2024
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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. 

Holocaust Memory
2024 Kristallnacht Commemoration: Rethinking Antisemitism in Our Times
Recorded on November 11, 2024
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Against the backdrop of the troubling rise in antisemitism around the world, a complex debate about how to define what is known as the oldest hatred continues unabated. On the 86th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom that took place November 9 and 10, 1938, Dr. Magda Teter, Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University and one of the scholars consulted on President Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, discusses the importance of rethinking how we study antisemitism, including what does and does not work.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Finding Home: Exploring the Cuban Jewish Experience in the Caribbean and the US
Recorded on October 30, 2024
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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 will encompass 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.