Making Global Connections

2025-26 Event Recordings

KHC-NEH Lecture
Varian Fry: The Audacious American Journalist Who Saved Europe’s Artists from the Nazis 
Recorded on April 28, 2026
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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 takes 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.

Faculty/Educator Workshop
‘What Would You Bring’: Narrating Difficult Histories in the Classroom
Recorded on April 24, 2026
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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 discusses 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
Finding Refuge at Bryn Mawr: The Exiled Mathematician Emmy Noether
Recorded on April 23, 2026
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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.

Human Rights & the Museum Series
Curation as Care
Recorded on April 22, 2026 
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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 addresses 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 also speaks 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.

Partner Event
From Hamitic Hypothesis to Hutu Power: The Intellectual Architecture of Genocide
Recorded on April 16, 2026
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April 2026 marks the third-second anniversary of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda when members of the Tutsi ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were systematically killed by Hutu militias. To mark these horrific events, join us as Jessica Mwiza, a French-Rwandan researcher who is currently a sociology doctoral student and lecturer at the City University of New York, presents a lecture on the intellectual architecture of genocide. Jessica Mwiza, a French-Rwandan researcher, has focused her work on social vulnerabilities, inequity, racism, and anti-Tutsi genocidal ideology. Mwiza is also a member of a Franco-Rwandan research group that focuses on general child psychiatry, transgenerational trauma, and addiction care in Rwanda. She has published numerous articles on colonialism, genocide denial, and anti-Tutsi ideology in the Great Lakes region and Europe. Her work has been featured in the journals Le 1 and AOC, and she has delivered public lectures at UNESCO, Paris City Hall, and the Arab World Institute, among other venues.

This event is part of Queensborough Community College’s (QCC) Unseen Threads initiative, a partnership between the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center and QCC’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Center. It is co-sponsored by the KHC and the Office of Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.

Holocaust Memory/Yom HaShoah Commemoration
Remembering to Remember: What Memorial Monuments Teach Us About the Holocaust (and Ourselves)
Recorded on Monday, April 13, 2026 
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Since the end of World War II Holocaust memorial monuments have been made in scores of shapes, sizes, forms and with text in many languages, initially for Jewish audiences, and then in more recent decades for a wider public, intended to teach broader lessons or meet political objectives. Given the breadth of these memorials, what roles do and/or should they play in art, history, commemoration, and education? Using the expansive data from the International Holocaust Memorial Monument Database, to which he has been a lead contributor, Dr. Samuel Gruber, President of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, reveals how these memorials both reflect and shape Jewish and other collective memories over the past 80 years.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Across Continents and Generations: Poetry as Memory and Witness
Recorded on March 17, 2026
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Join us for a poetry reading with acclaimed poets Julia Kolchinsky and Luisa Muradyan, who came to the United States from Ukraine in the 90s as Jewish refugees and are both descendants of Holocaust survivors. The writers share work from their books PARALLAX and I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, which deal with raising children under the shadow of intergenerational trauma and the war against Ukraine. They also read from their forthcoming collaborative collection, When The World Stopped Touching, an unfiltered account of mothering young children through quarantine written during the pandemic. 

KHC-NEH Professional Development Workshop
Pedagogy, Human Rights & Philosophy in the Face of Oppression
Recorded on March 13, 2026
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In this workshop, QCC philosophy professor Dr. Shannon Kincaid introduces participants to both the idea of discussion-based pedagogy, as rooted in American Pragmatism, and to its implementation in teaching texts that speak to the theme of the 2025-26 KHC-NEH colloquium, Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism. Key examples will come by way of academics that fled oppression.

KHC-NEH Lecture
From Swastika to Jim Crow: The German Jewish Refugee Scholars Hired at HBCUs 
Recorded on March 5, 2026
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From Swastika to Jim Crow tells the story of German Jewish scholars who joined the faculty at historically Black colleges and universities in the South and the challenges of leaving one oppressive society for another. In this discussion, documentarians Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler share their process making the film, from working with local historian Gabrielle Edgecomb to interviewing retired professors such as philosopher Ernst Manasse who taught at North Carolina Central University for almost 40 years, and the students they mentored, including Obama administration advisor and economist Joyce Ladner. 

Holocaust Memory & Jewish Identity in Latin America and the Caribbean Series
A Forgotten Story of Holocaust Refuge in Bolivia
Recorded on March 4, 2026
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During the critical years of the Jewish refugee crisis, one unlikely country opened its doors: Bolivia. At the time, Bolivia was perceived as a poor and struggling nation, still recovering from the devastating war with Paraguay (1932–1935). Yet, against all expectations, the country welcomed around 20,000 Jewish refugees. Why did Bolivia become a refuge for many when other Latin American countries turned people away? Join anthropologist and historian Dr. Sandra Gruner-Domic as she explores the dynamics of the refugee community in Bolivia, as well as the geopolitical inferences and responses to migration of undesired people in unexpected regions.

Partner Program
Law, Accountability and the Fight to Bring Nazis to Justice in Postwar Germany
Recorded on February 25, 2026
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This program examines the postwar era in Germany when hundreds of thousands of Nazi war criminals reentered society. It explores the obstacles of bringing them to justice, and the failures of denazification. The panel will explore the gap between legal justice and moral responsibility, and the consequences of rebuilding a country without full accountability for the Holocaust and crimes against humanity. It features an unknown hero who battled the system, at great personal cost, to exact a legal reckoning. First, Jack Fairweather, author of, The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice, will discuss Fritz Bauer, a gay, German Jewish prosecutor who relentlessly sought to prosecute Nazi criminals after World War II, even when German society preferred silence, denial, and reintegration of former Nazis. Next, Dr. Kathrin Meyer, the former Secretary-General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance & member of the TOLI Board of Directors, will speak about her personal experience growing up in Germany after the war and her research on the denazification of Germany. Moderated by Professor Jocelyn Getgen, Faculty Director of the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights.

This program was organized by the Olga Lengyel Institute (TOLI) for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights and is co-sponsored by the Kupferberg Holocaust Center; Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights; Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture; and the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University.

Holocaust Memory/International Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemoration
Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler’s Germany
Recorded on January 27, 2026
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Between 1933 and 1945, hundreds of Jews resisted persecution in Nazi Germany and annexed Austria, including public protest and taking pictures to document persecution, despite being often heavily punished by the regime. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations, and professions resisted obliterates the common view of Jewish passivity under Nazi persecution. In commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Dr. Wolf Gruner presents a new and broader definition of resistance including five different kinds of individual acts, and a large set of new sources, ranging from police and court records to survivor testimonies and photographs. Dr. Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008. He is the Founding Director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Flight or Fight? Artists in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Recorded on December 3, 2025 
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Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialist regime controlled artistic work in Germany. Join Rachel Stern, founding director of the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, for a discussion about the system of fear and control installed by the Nazis, its impact on the national cultural landscape, and artists’ strategies of survival.

Unseen Threads Series
Memorializing Black History: Heritage, Culture and Community at the Weeksville Heritage Center
Recorded on November 19, 2025
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The Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts, and a social justice lens to preserve, document, and inspire engagement with the history of one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America. Join Dr. Raymond Codrington, Weeksville’s President and CEO, and Irvin Weathersby, Jr., author of In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space (Penguin Random House, 2025), for a conversation about memory, historic preservation, as well as the connections of cultural heritage institutions to the local communities in which they are based.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Deciding Who Was Worth Saving: American Universities and the Refugee Scholars of the Nazi Era
Recorded on November 12, 2025
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Despite the triumphalist tale that during the Nazi era the United States rescued Europe’s intellectual elite, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, thousands of European scholars sought to immigrate to the United States and couldn’t. American universities refused to hire them and the State Department erected barriers to letting them in, meaning many lost not only their livelihoods, but also their lives. Dr. Laurel Leff, author of Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 2019), introduces a few of those scholars and explain how academic institutions in the United States undertook these fraught choices. 

Holocaust Memory/Kristallnacht Commemoration
Fragments of Memory: Lost Notebooks of Children’s Testimonies from the Holocaust
Recorded on November 10, 2025 
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In 1945, a group of survivors in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp opened several schools for the growing number of orphaned and displaced children at the camp. To help their young charges heal, the teachers encouraged them to write and speak about their traumatic wartime experiences. Recently uncovered notebooks of child testimonies together with fragmentary archival collections scattered across multiple repositories tell the story of this early documentary effort. On the 87^th anniversary of the November 1938 pogroms also known as Kristallnacht, Dr. Regina Kazyulina and Dr. Christopher Mauriello, Directors of Salem State University’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, discuss the teachers who did everything in their power, despite their own wartime traumas, to ensure the children’s stories and voices would not be forgotten.

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
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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.