BIOS

Corbin Allardice is a graduate of the University of Chicago where he majored in Jewish studies with a focus on modern Yiddish literature. His interests include modernist Yiddish poetry, post-Holocaust Yiddish literature, Yiddish-German cultural dialogue, and translation theory. He is based in New York where he frequently works in the Yiddish theater, and as a translator.

contact: corbin.allardice@gmail.com

Dr. Michal Ben Ya'akov holds a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA), an

M.A. from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in

historical geography (2001), also from the Hebrew University. Dr. Michal Ben Ya'akov was an Associate

Professor at the Efrata College for Education, Jerusalem, chaired the History Department and was the

founding director (2016-2018) of a unique M.Ed. program;Memory, Jewish Heritage and Education;.

She was a research fellow at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA), and

recently, at the Fordham University-New York Public Library in Jewish Studies and the Jacob Rader

Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, OH). Currently she is a Speigel Fellow at

The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research of Bar-Ilan University.

Her principle areas of research deal with Jews in Palestine and North Africa in the 19 th and 20 th

centuries, focusing on women in these communities, migration, and the Jews in North Africa during

World War II. She has edited four volumes, lectured widely in Israel and abroad, and published nearly

fifty articles, including: European Jewish Refugees in Morocco during World War II, Avotaynu XXXI, 2

(2015,) and Hélène Cazès Ben-Attar et ses activés en faveur des réfugiés juifs au Maroc, 1940-1943;

(in: D. Michman &H. Saadoun \(eds.), Les Juifs d'Afrique du Nord face à l'Allemagne nazie (Paris:

Perrin, 2018).

Contact information: michal.ben.yaakov@gmail.com

Professor Judy Baumel-Schwartz is the Director of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, the Abraham and Edita Spiegel Family Professor in Holocaust Research, the Rabbi Pynchas Brener Professor in Research on the Holocaust of European Jewry, and Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry. Born in New York, she immigrated to Israel and completed her degrees at Bar-Ilan University (PhD History 1986). She directed the Institute for the Study of Religious Zionism (2009-11), the Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism (2011-17), and the Helena and Paul Schulmann School for Basic Jewish Studies (2013-18), all at Bar-Ilan University. Since 2018 she has directed the Finkler Institute of Holocaust research. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about religious life during and after the Holocaust, gender and the Holocaust, Holocaust commemoration and public memory in the State of Israel.

contact: baumelj@gmail.com

Dr. Andrew Buchanan is a public high school teacher in NJ who thelped write the NJ Commission on Holocaust Education and the NJ Hellenic American Heritage Commission state curriculum “Greece – Prior to, During and After the Holocaust.” Dr. Buchanan travelled to Greece for research, having received the Margot Stern Strom Innovation Grant from Facing History and Ourselves. In October 2016, he gave the Oxi Day Commemorative Lecture at Ellis Island. Dr. Buchanan is a USHMM Museum Teacher Fellow and a member of the USHMM Regional Education Corps providing Holocaust education for new ELA and Social Studies teachers in Washington DC. A Jewish Foundation for the Righteous Alfred Lerner Fellow, Dr. Buchanan is a recipient of the Robert I. Goldman Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education. Dr. Buchanan and his students participated in a filming of their work, titled, Holocaust Diaries, which received an Emmy Nomination in the Public/Current/Community Affairs Program/Special category. He has studied at historical Holocaust sites in Germany, Poland, and at Yad Vashem and the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz in Israel.

Dr Andrea Genest is the head of the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum. She studied political science and German literature at the Free University Berlin. Her PhD is written on the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland 1968 and its perception in Poland before and after 1989. In her research, she focuses on Polish and German contemporary history as well as history of memory. She worked as a research associate at the Free University Berlin and the Potsdam Center on Contemporary History as well as at the Memorial Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, Sandbostel, the German Resistance Memorial Centre (Berlin), the Marienfelde Refugee Centre Museum, and the Nazi Forces Labor Documentation Centre in Berlin.

contact: genest@ravensbrueck.de

Dr. Sharon Geva is a Lecturer at the Kibbutzim College and a teaching fellow in the NCJW Women and Gender Studies programme at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of the To the unknown sister: Holocaust heroines in Israeli society (Tel Aviv, 2010) [Hebrew]. Her recent publications include: “Ahead of Its Time: Ha'ishah Bamedinah, The story of a forgotten women's Journal in Israel”, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 34 (Spring 2019); “Case Closed: Women in the Israeli Police 1948–1958”, Israel Studies 24.1 (2019); “‘With and Despite the Burden of the Past’: 1946 in the Life Story of Zivia Lubetkin.” MORESHET Journal for the Study of the Holocaust and Antisemitism, 14 (2017). In 2011 Dr. Geva launched the project, “Raising Value: Returning Women to History”.

contact: geva.sharon@gmail.com

Chad S.A. Gibbs is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dissertation project, “Against that Darkness: Perseverance, Resistance, and Revolt at Treblinka,” uses spatial and social network analyses to uncover relationships and geographies pivotal to the organization of prisoner resistance. Maintaining his interests

in the interpersonal bonds of resistance placemaking throughout, Chad further undertakes the first substantial research of gender in life and resistance at Treblinka while exploring the long-overlooked experiences of women. Chad’s work in the almost entirely male Treblinka testimonial archive contributes parallel interests in the influence of masculinity on the history and memory of women at the camp. He is particularly drawn to study of the differences between male survivor recollections of women and their participation in resistance in early postwar investigation sources and late-life oral history interviews. Chad is an Affiliated Researcher with the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research where he was recently Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow. His work has been supported by the Fred and Maria Devinki Memorial Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the inaugural Dori Laub Fellowship at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive, and fellowships from the George L. Mosse Program in History.

Contact Information

cgibbs4@wisc.edu www.chadsagibbs.com

Hana Green is a third-year doctoral student and Claims Conference Fellow studying history at Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Green completed her MA in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa. She earned a BA in History from The University of Florida and after completing her undergraduate studies, served in the Teach for America corps where she taught Middle School language arts and history. Her dissertation considers the phenomenon of passing under the guise of a false identity during the Holocaust and explores the ways in which Jewish women navigated survival on a day-to-day basis in this context. Her work engages with interdisciplinary theories and models of identity passing and focuses on how one's identity conceptions and transformations impacted both their experiences and survivorship. The project will consider diverse case studies of Jewish women passing in various regions and settings across Europe during the Holocaust, but places a particular focus on passing in Germany and Austria. It is Green’s hope to underscore the breadth and variation of experiences of Jewish women during this historical epoch, and to highlight passing as a distinct mechanism of survival during the Holocaust.

Contact: HGreen@clarku.edu

Roberta Grossman speaks to students and communities about Jewish history and documentary filmmaking as a tool for social justice. Grossman received the 2018 Washington Jewish Film Festival’s Annual Visionary Award, which recognizes “creativity and insight in presenting the full diversity of the Jewish experience through the moving image.” In the past ten years, she has directed and produced four feature documentaries about Jewish history and culture – BLESSED IS THE MATCH (2008); HAVA NAGILA (The Movie) (2012); ABOVE AND BEYOND (2014) and WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY (2018). Grossman’s work also deals with women’s rights in SEEING ALLRED (2018), and Native American history and contemporary struggles in 500 NATIONS (1995), HOMELAND: FOUR PORTRAITS OF NATIVE ACTION (2005) and ISHI'S RETURN (2018). Grossman is a three-time recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is the co-founder of the non-profit production company Katahdin Productions. She received her undergraduate degree with honors in history at UC Berkeley and her M.A. in film from the American Film Institute.

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Founding Director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. He is the author of ten books, among them “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims”, with Cambridge University Press (paperback 2008), „Parias de la Patria“. El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890” (Plural Editores 2015), and, most recently, the prizewinning “The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses” (Berghahn 2019). The book was published in German 2016, in Czech 2019 and is forthcoming in Hebrew 2020. He coedited four books, including “Resisting Persecution. Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust” (Berghahn 2020), “ New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” (Purdue UP 2019). His new book “’Impudent Jews’. Forgotten Stories of Individual Jewish Resistance in Hitler’s Germany” is coming out with Yale University press in fall 2022.

Contact: gruner@usc.edu

Sonja M. Hedgepeth is a full professor in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Middle Tennessee State University. In addition to German, she has taught extensively about the Holocaust, women's issues, and world literature. Her articles and numerous presentations cover a wide range of topics, including German exile literature and the Shoah. Sonja Hedgepeth has published a book in German on Else Lasker-Schüler, as well as co-edited a dual-language book on this famous German-Jewish writer. She is the co-editor of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (co-edited with Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel, Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010).

Sylvia Hershcovitz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Her work is still in process, and is coordinated by Prof. Moshe Rosman from Bar Ilan University. She is a Spiegel Fellow in The Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute for Holocaust Research and coordinating the Romanian Forum within the institute. Her research is about the missing link: The Jewish Women and their Organizations in Romania during the First Part of the 20th Century. The dissertation focuses on the quotidian lives of these women and their organizations, their identity, activities and their unique contribution to the women and children's lives during this period of time in Romania. One of the chapters is devoted to MelaIancu, the head of the Jewish Center for the Protection of Mother and Child - a heroine of the Holocaust, whose brave activity saved and helped thousands of children during the Holocaust in Romania.

Contact: shershcovitz@gmail.com

Laura Hilton is a Professor of History at Muskingum University, where she has taught for two decades. She completed her PhD in Modern European History in 2001 from The Ohio State University. She has published on Jewish, Latvian, and Polish Displaced Persons, the black market in postwar Germany, and stateless persons in postwar Europe. She has been a Teaching Fellow at the USHMM twice (January 2002; June 2009) and a Research Fellow at summer research workshops three times (2003, 2005, & 2013). In 2016, she was a Fellow at the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) 21st Annual Summer Institute for the Study of the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization. She is a member of HEFNU's Virtual Speaker's Bureau. In 2008, she received the William Oxley Thompson Award for excellence in Teaching from Muskingum University. She is currently writing a book-length examination of the culture of rumors in postwar Germany.

Recent publications include:“Memorialization, Reconciliation, & Reflection: Teaching the Aftermaths of Genocide in Postwar Europe and Rwanda,” The History Teacher, forthcoming, Volume 54, 2021; Co-Editor, Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).; “Postwar Food Rumors: Security, Victimhood, and Fear,” in Food, Culture, and Identity in Germany’s Century of War, Heather Benbow and Heather Perry (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan, December, 2019: 177-200.; “Who Was ‘Worthy’? How Empathy Drove Policy Decisions about the Uprooted in Occupied Germany, 1945–1948,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 32, Issue 1, 2018: 8-28.

contact: lhilton@muskingum.edu

Elizabeth Hyman is an independent scholar, public historian, and archivist. She graduated from the University of Maryland-College Park with her MA in Modern Jewish History, and MLIS in Archival Science in 2014. Her thesis was titled “‘An Uncertain Life in Another World’: German and Austrian Jewish Refugee Life in Shanghai, 1938-1950.”

She has worked as a Processing Archivist for the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History since January 2016, and she is will soon assume the role of Digital Content Manager. Elizabeth has been writing a history blog aimed at the general public since March 2011; she currently has over 117,500 followers, and her posts regarding the histories of gender and the Holocaust, women and the Holocaust, and female Holocaust resisters are among her most popular, with one commanding over 147,000 interactions.

Since 2013, she has been working on a manuscript tentatively titled The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto, a public-facing work following the lives of five Warsaw-based female Jewish resistance workers, 1939-1945.

Dr. Insa Eschebach was the director of the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, Fürstenberg, Germany from 2005 - 2020. She is teaching at the Institute for Religious Studies of the Free University Berlin. Her main areas of research are the history and post-history of the concentration camps, women’s and gender studies, and the history of commemoration.nPublications in English and French include: The Ravensbrück Woman’s Concentration Camp. History and Memory (together with Alyn Bessmann, Berlin 2013); Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp: Memories in Situ (in: Witnessing unbound. Holocaust Representation and the Origins of Memory, edited by Henri Lustiger and Habbo Knoch, Wayne State University Press 2017); Créer son prope lieu social. Les activités culturelles dans le camp de concentration pour femmes de Ravensbrück (in: Chanter, Rire et Résister à Ravensbrück. Autour de Germaine Tillion et du Verfügbar aux Enfer, sous la direction de Philippe Despoix et al., Le genre humain, Seuil 2018) From the 1970s Feminism to Gender Research at Ravensbrück: Autobiografical

Considerations (in: Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and Dalia Ofer (eds.) Her Story, my Story? Writing about women and the Holocaust, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Peter Lang 2020), edited by Henri Lustiger and Habbo Knoch, Wayne State University Press 2017):Créer son prope lieu social. Les activités culturelles dans le camp de concentration pour femmes de Ravensbrück (in: Chanter, Rire et Résister à Ravensbrück. Autour de Germaine Tillion et du Verfügbar aux Enfer, sous la direction de Philippe Despoix et al., Le genre.umain, Seuil 2018) From the 1970s Feminism to Gender Research at Ravensbrück: Autobiografical Considerations (in: Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and Dalia Ofer (eds.) Her Story, my Story? Writing about women and the Holocaust, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Peter Lang 2020)

Sayantani is a fourth year PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Southern California. Her research specialization is in Comparative Genocide Studies, with special focus on the history of the Holocaust and the history of the Indian Partition. Sayantani is currently working on a dissertation project that explores the history of the November Pogrom in Berlin in 1938 and the Great Calcutta Killings in Calcutta in 1946. Through micro historical research and comparative analysis, her project tries to complicate the existing international discourse around riots and pogroms, as well as explore questions of gendered violence and memory cultures around traumatic pasts. Sayantani has previously presented at the Biennial Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars in Cambodia in 2019, and more recently at the Genealogies of Memory Conference organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw in November 2020. She was also a 2019 fellow at the Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University. In November 2021, she will be presenting on her project at the Lessons and Legacies Conference. Sayantani currently holds fellowships from the Central European Historical Society and the German Historical Institute.

Preferred contact info - sjana@usc.edu

.

Sabine Kalff studied German Literature, Culture Studies and American Studies at Humboldt Unversity, Berlin and La Sapienza, Rome. She earned her PhD at Hamburg University in 2011 with a PhD thesis on „Political Medicine in the Early Modern Period. The Figure of the Physician in Early 17th Italy and England“, published in 2014 (De Gruyter).

After having worked at the University of Kassel and at the Department of Comparative Literature / Romance Studies at the Free University, Berlin, she joined the German Department of the Humboldt University, Berlin as an Assistant Professor. She is currently working on her second book on German female life-writing on the air warfare in WW2, entitled “Aerial Affairs. Female Conduct Codes in the Air Warfare, Germany 1925 to 1945“. It investigates the narratives of victims of the air warfare as well as those from active war participants, specially those of female pilots. Kalff is further preparing a broader project on women pilots in WW2.

Professor Yitzchak Kermen is Historian and Researcher on Greek & Sephardic Jewry, & the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dept. of Jewish History, formerly at Institute of Jewish Languages, & graduate-level Mekor Program in Sephardic Studies, Dept. of Jewish History. He has served as an historical witness in Israeli class action legal suits of Iraqi Farhud and Moroccan Holocaust victims to receive Holocaust reparations. He has been a Spiegal fellow at the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar Ilan University,Guest Israeli scholar in Sephardic studies, American Jewish University (2008-2009), Los Angeles, California, USA, Founder & Director of the Institute of Hellenic-Jewish Relations, University of Denver. Researcher of Greek Jewry in Holocaust, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. He is past sub-editor of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (section on the Balkans), Yad Vashem and past contributor to the Encyclopedia of Jews in Islam (Leiden: Brill), Larousse Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, & Ben-Zvi Institute series on history & culture of the Sephardic Jewish communities. He co-oordinated the research group, Sephardic & Oriental Jewry in Holocaust, Summer Institute 1999, USHMM.

Contact: ykeremster@gmail.com

Borbála Klacsmann received an MA degree in History (2008), a BA in Ethnography from Eötvös Loránd University (2010), and an MA diploma in Comparative History with a specialization in Jewish Studies from Central European University (2012). Between 2007 and 2012 she worked as an exhibition guide and educator at the Holocaust Memorial Center (Budapest), then for three years she implemented the educational programs of the Anne Frank House in Hungary. Since September 2015 she has been a doctoral student at the Department of History of the University of Szeged, while at the same time being a member of the Hungarian research group of Yad Vashem.

Contact info: bklacsmann@gmail.com

Bożena Karwowska – Professor, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies,

University of British Columbia in Vancouver (Canada). Her academic interests include reader response

and reception theories, feminist theories, migration studies, and representations of Holocaust. Among

her four monographs and several edited volumes is Body, Sexuality, Concentration Camps (2009),

Second Sex in Exile (2013) and Auschwitz: History, Place and People (2021). Since 2014 she directs the

UBC Witnessing Auschwitz, an undergraduate intensive research seminar run in a cooperation with the

Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum. Essays by students of the seminar are included in the book The More

I Know, The Less I Understand (2017), and many projects are accompanying the 2021 Auschwitz

Museum publication Home - Auschwitz Academic Guide (ubc.ca)

Samantha Lakin, M.A., is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, and a former Graduate Research Fellow at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Lakin holds a Master of Arts in International Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Tufts University. She was a Fulbright scholar in Rwanda (2017-2018) and in Switzerland (2011-2012). Her research focuses on issues of memory and transitional justice in states and societies emerging from mass atrocities and genocide to peace. Lakin has worked in the Great Lakes region of Africa since 2013, specifically in Rwanda. She founded the Department of Research, Policy, and Higher Education at Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial, has worked as a community consultant for the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation with the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda, and as a Team Lead on research about gender and corruption in Lubumbashi, DRC. As an active public speaker and author on social justice issues, Samantha teaches students in MCI-Concord, a medium-security male prison, through the Emerson Prison Initiative. Her first book, Heroines of Vichy France: Rescuing French Jews During the Holocaust, is co-authored with Paul R. Bartop and was published in 2019.

contact: slakin@clarku.edu or samantha.lakin1@gmail.com

Anita Lukic received her Ph.D. in Modern German Language and Literature in 2016 from Indiana University in Bloomington before joining the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting lecturer and later visiting assistant professor. Her research has taken her from the eighteenth-century German lands to post-WWII Yugoslavia, where she was born. As a way to celebrate the more positive aspects of her former country, she has become interested in the diversity of everyday Yugoslavia, particularly as it was experienced in the multi-ethnic Partisan resistance movement during World War II. Currently, Anita serves as the Assistant Director of Chicago Field Studies, an academic internship program, at Northwestern University.

Contact: anitalukic30@gmail.com

Daan de Leeuw (1987) is a PhD Candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide

Studies, Clark University, USA. He holds a BA and MA in History from the University of

Amsterdam. His MA thesis on Nazi doctors who committed human experiments on prisoners in

German concentration camps during World War II was awarded the Volkskrant-IISG Thesis

Award 2014. His doctoral research is on Jewish slave labor from a spatial perspective during

World War II. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and

Genocide Studies in Amsterdam as research assistant and as Project Manager of EHRI

(European Holocaust Research Infrastructure).

Contact: DdeLeeuw@clarku.edu

Katy S. Matello has served as a high school history teacher with the Cobb County School District in Georgia for nearly a decade. During her tenure, she designed and implemented the district's first Holocaust and Genocide Studies elective course. Her interest in Holocaust Education began after researching Holocaust Denial and the significance of education in transmitting accurate history for future generations as part of her undergraduate coursework for her BS in History Education at Kennesaw State University. This led Katy to participate in numerous seminars and conferences in the United States and abroad, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Belfer Conference for Educators and the Echoes & Reflections Advanced Learning Seminar at Yad Vashem. Katy holds a MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Gratz College. While completing her degree, she was selected to be a member of the 2018 Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellows Program. Her research encompasses the roles and experiences of women in the Holocaust, specifically women in social welfare-oriented professions in Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland. Katy has also served as a member of the Advisory Board of the Museum of History and Holocaust Education since 2016. In this capacity, she promotes community activities, offers advice on the development of museum initiatives, and leads professional development workshops for educators.

Verena Meier studied History, English Philology, European Art History, and Philosophy at the Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has previously worked at the Documentation and Cultural Centre of German Sinti and Roma and assisted with creating a new traveling exhibition. She also worked with the Working Group on Minority History and Civil Rights in Europe, at the memorial site Grafeneck, and the Documentation Center of North African Jewry during WWII at the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. Since August 2018 she is a PhD candidate at the Research Center on Antigypsyism (Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus) at the University of Heidelberg. The topic of her dissertation project is the persecution of Sinti and Roma under the Nazi-regime in Magdeburg. Her research interests include minority history, the history of ideas, and research on historical stereotypes.

contact: verena.meier@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de

Dr. Laura Morowitz is Professor of Art History at Wagner College, and Senior Research and Programming Assistant of the Wagner College Holocaust Center. In 2012 she began teaching her course on Art and Aesthetics in the Third Reich and in 2019 she and Dr. Weintrob designed and curated the Center’s Education and Action Gallery. She is the author of three books and has published in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, The Oxford Art Journal, The Journal of the History of Collections, The Journal of Popular Film and Television and Cultural Critique among other places. In 2011 she received a Hadassah Brandeis Research Institute Award for her work on a book dealing with Klimt’s confiscated Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In 2020 her article, “Ostmark as Bulwark, Hitler as Liberator and other Myths of the Anschluss” appeared in Contemporary Austrian Studies, vol. 29. She is currently at work on two manuscripts, Art, Exhibition and Erasure in Nazi Vienna, for which she was a awarded an NEH summer stipend in 2017 and a co-edited volume, with Dr. Megan Brandow-Faller, Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design, forthcoming from Routledge Press in 2023. She will be contributing the chapter on Art and the Holocaust to Sources for Studying the Holocaust:A Guide for Students, edited by Paul Bartrop.

contact: lmorowit@wagner.edu

Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918. Mouradian has published articles on concentration camps, unarmed resistance, the aftermath of mass violence, midwifery in the Middle East, and approaches to teaching history. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review. Mouradian has taught courses on imperialism, mass violence, urban space and conflict in the Middle East, the aftermaths of war and mass violence, and human rights at Worcester State University, Clark University, Stockton University, Rutgers University, and California State University – Fresno.

contact: km3253@columbia.edu

Dr. Denisa Nešťáková is historian. She is an external research associate at the Comenius University with her post-doctoral project Women and Men in the Labour Camp Sereď, Slovakia which was supported by a post-doctoral grant of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, Paris, France. Since May 2019 she has also worked as a research associate at the Herder Institute for the project “‘Family Planning’ in East Central Europe from the 19th Century until the Authorization of ‘the Pill’”, focusing on Czechoslovakia. She studied History and Slovak language and literature at the Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia), and Jewish civilizations at the Hochschule für jüdische Studien in Heidelberg (Germany). In June 2018, she defended her dissertation thesis titled “Whoever is not with me is against me.” Arab-Jewish relations during British Mandate for Palestine through the perspective of the German Temple Society at the Comenius University in Bratislava.

Contact: denisa.nestakova@gmail.com

Dr. Daniela Ozacky-Stern is a Post-doctoral researcher in the Institute of Holocaust Research, at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Additionally, she is a lecturer at The Holocaust Studies Program at The Western Galilee College, in Akko, Israel. She conducted a post-doctoral research at Yad Vashem, researching Jewish escapes to the forests during the Holocaust, and was the director of

Moreshet Holocaust Archive in Givat Haviva for over ten years. Dr. Ozacky-Stern earned her Ph.D. in Jewish History at The University of Haifa, Israel, studying the Jewish partisans in the forests of Lithuania and Belarus during WWII and the Holocaust. She recently published an article in The International Journal of Military History and Historiography about executions

of Jewish partisans in the Lithuanian forests. She earned a masters degree in General History from The School of History in Tel-Aviv University and her thesis dealt with Nazi propaganda led by Joseph Goebbels during the last year of WWII. This Thesis was published as a book.

Contact info:

danielaozacky@gmail.com

Avinoam J. Patt, Ph.D. is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary

Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. Until July 2019, he served as the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice

Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he was also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization. Previously, he

worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States

Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, May 2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons,

titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010); and is a

contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011). He

is also director of the In Our Own Words Interview Project with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and is co-editor of an anthology of

contemporary American Jewish fiction entitled The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (Wayne State University

Press, 2015). He is co-editor of a new volume on The Joint Distribution Committee at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (Wayne State, 2019) and recently completed a new book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw. Ghetto Uprising (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, published by Wayne State UP in May 2021). Together with David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, he is co-editor of a new volume Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (April 2020) and, with Laura Hilton, is co-editor of the new volume Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2020).

Dr. Andrea Pető is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is author of 6 monographs, editor of 31 volumes, as well as 259 articles and chapters in books published in 21 languages. Her articles have appeared in leading journals including East European Politics and Society, Feminist Theory, NORA, Journal of Women’s History, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Clio, Baltic Worlds, European Politics and Society, International Women’s Studies Forum. In 2005, she was awarded the Officer’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary by the President of the Hungarian Republic and the Bolyai Prize by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2018 she was awarded the All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She is author, with Ildikó Barna, of Political Justice in Budapest after WWII (2015) and co-editor, with Ayşe Gül Altınay, of Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversation on War, Genocide and Political Violence (2016) and edited the volume on War in the Interdisciplinary Handbook: Gender series (Macmillan, 2017

contact: petoa@ceu.edu

Elisabeth Pönisch is working as a research assistant at the Chair of Sociology of Markets,

Organizations and Governance at the University of Jena. Additionally, she is a Ph.D.

candidate at the Department of Sociology of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. The

title of her doctoral research study is: “The Excluded in the ‘Judenhäuser’. The Sociology of a

Coerced Community”. Since summer 2019, she has a teaching position at the University of

Halle. There she gives courses about “Sociology of violence” and “Sociology of the camp”.

In summer 2018, she received a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies from the

Jewish Claims Conference (09/2016-08/2018). For the academic year 2013/2014, she was

also a fellow of the Leo Baeck Programme, organized by the Leo Baeck Institute London and

the German National Academic Foundation.

In 2015, she was awarded with a four-month research fellowship by the Center for Holocaust

Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich (01/2015-04/2015) and additionally

International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem granted her a two-week

research fellowship.

Contact: elisabeth.poenisch@uni-jena.de

Elisabeth Pönisch is working as a research assistant at the Chair of Sociology of Markets,

Organizations and Governance at the University of Jena. Additionally, she is a Ph.D.

candidate at the Department of Sociology of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. The

title of her doctoral research study is: “The Excluded in the ‘Judenhäuser’. The Sociology of a

Coerced Community”. Since summer 2019, she has a teaching position at the University of

Halle. There she gives courses about “Sociology of violence” and “Sociology of the camp”.

In summer 2018, she received a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Studies from the

Jewish Claims Conference (09/2016-08/2018). For the academic year 2013/2014, she was

also a fellow of the Leo Baeck Programme, organized by the Leo Baeck Institute London and

the German National Academic Foundation.

In 2015, she was awarded with a four-month research fellowship by the Center for Holocaust

Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich (01/2015-04/2015) and additionally

International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem granted her a two-week

research fellowship.

Contact: elisabeth.poenisch@uni-jena.de

Avihu Ronen is a senior lecturer at Tel Hai Academic College and an associate lecturer in Jewish history at The University of Haifa. His studies focused on the history of youth movements during the Holocaust and he has published several books and papers on this issue, including: Third Person, Singular: Biographies of Youth Movement Activists During the Holocaust (Hebrew), which he co-edited with Yehoyakim Cochavi (1994–1995) and The Battle for Life: The History of the Jewish Underground in Hungary during the Holocaust (1994).He won the 2013 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for his publication focusing on his mother, the Warsaw ghetto fighter Chajka Klinger, Condemned to Life: The Diaries and Life of Chajka Klinger (University of Haifa and Yedioth Books, 2011)

contact: avihuronen@gmail.com

Sheri Rosenblum, MA, is the Director of Development and Outreach for the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. She holds both a BA and an MA in Judaic Studies from UCLA and Brandeis University. Sheri studied for two years under the renowned Dr. Amos Funkenstein (z'' l), winner of the coveted Israel Prize for History. She wrote her undergraduate thesis, Moral Dilemmas of the Judenrat, under the direction of Dr. Arnold Band, the A. Savitt Fellow at the United States Holocaust Museum.

During the summer of 1978, Sheri studied under Shalmi Balmor, Yad Vashem’s Founder and Director of the Department of Education from 1972-1996, accessing documents from Yad Vashem’s archives, and records, at Lohamei HaGeta’ot for use in her thesis.

An expert on the history of the Jewish partisans, Sheri speaks on the subject to worldwide audiences, trains educators, has consulted on documentary films, and has been a guest presenter on NPR and for Amazon podcasts.

sheri@jewishpartisans.org

Elke Weesjes (Sabella) is a substitute assistant professor of History at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn where she is Research Director of their Holocaust Center. Dr. Weesjes is also a visiting research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. She is the author of Growing Up Communist in the Netherlands and Britain: Childhood, Political Activism, and Identity Formation (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021). Dr. Weesjes has done extensive research into the Dutch communist resistance against the Nazis, and the impact of the Cold War on the commemoration of resistance fighters and recognitions of their efforts. As part of this research, she has conducted a series of interviews with 28 children of communist resistance fighters. She is further an editorial board member of Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History (Lawrence and Wishart, London). Her work has been published by academic outlets including Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique; Children Youth, and Environments; The Psychologist; Twentieth Century Communism, A Journal of International History; Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies; Biografie Bulletin; and Labour/Le Travail. Her second book, Rode Levens. Communistische Gezinnen in the Koude Oorlog (Amsterdam: Walburg Pers) is forthcoming in Spring 2023.

email: Elke.Sabella@kbcc.cuny.edu

Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel is the founder and executive director of the Remember the Women Institute, a not-for-profit organization based in New York City that carries out and encourages research and cultural projects that integrate women into history, especially Holocaust history. She is the author or editor of six books on various aspects of the Holocaust, including Mielec, Poland: The Shtetl That Became a Nazi Concentration Camp (Gefen Publishers, 2012), The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), Fiorello's Sister: Gemma La Guardia Gluck's Story (Syracuse University Press, 2007), and Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (co-edited with Dr. Sonja M. Hedgepeth, Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010). She has curated exhibits on women and the Holocaust and has written and lectured on the subject throughout the United States and internationally for more than 35 years.

contact: rgsaidel@rememberwomen.org

Jay Saper is a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow translating the poetry of Vilna partisan Rikle Glezer. Jay’s papercuts of Jewish women in the resistance to the Nazis appear in There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists (AK Press 2021). Creator of Antifascist Yiddish for Beginners, Jay blends the teaching of language with history to fortify activist communities. Jay is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Middlebury College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

I am a historian of the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history. I work as Historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), the only NGO that negotiates with the German government for compensation for Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Social justice, education, and research are at the core of my professional endeavors. I have worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), dubbed “the global Jewish 9-1-1,” and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. I taught graduate courses at Kean University, undergraduate courses at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, and I served as faculty adviser and educator in the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education at the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers.

In addition, I have worked as a researcher, translator, and consultant for projects ranging from academic texts to websites, films, TV programs, and exhibits.

As a public historian, I have many years of experience speaking to diverse audiences on topics related to the Holocaust, Jewish history, and Polish history.

Justina Smalkyté is a PhD candidate at the Center of History at Sciences Po where she is preparing a dissertation on anti-Nazi resistance movements in German-occupied Lithuania (1941-1944). She holds a double MA in European History from Paris Diderot University and Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in History from Vilnius University. Her doctoral research examines resistance through the lens of material culture: while focusing on a wide range of material objects used by anti-Nazi resistance members her thesis attempts to shed a new light on practices of resistance and violence in the Generalbezirk Litauen. She is also a teaching instructor for a BA course on the history of the 20th and 21st century empires at Sciences Po. Her research has been supported by research grants of the Sciences Po graduate school, the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at Yad Vashem.

contact: justina.smalkyte@sciencespo.fr

Dr. Lori Weintrob is Professor of History and founding director of the Wagner College Holocaust Center, Staten Island, New York. She teaches Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and the Holocaust in Film, Theater and the Arts. Lori has connected Holocaust survivors with thousands of youth of all faiths in the tri-state area. She is co-editor of Beyond Bystanders: Educational Leadership for a Human Culture in a Globalizing Reality (2017) and Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (2012). She is co-author of the original play Rise Up: Young Holocaust Heroes. Recent presentations include “Thou Shalt not be a bystander: Holocaust Education for Empathy, Ethics and Courage,” at Kibbutzim College of Education and “Heroines of the Holocaust: Vitka Kempner-Kovner and Sara Ginaite” for the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She is currently editing Eyewitness to History: Documents of the Holocaust (ABC-CLIO Press) and completing a project on Zivia Lubetkin and other female resistance leaders. She has received awards for community-building and interfaith social justice activism, including with African-American and African Youth, the Albanian-Islamic Cultural Center and the Pride Center of Staten Island. She was fortunate to have studied the Holocaust with Saul Friedlander. Lori received her B.A. from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

contact: lrweintr@wagner.edu, holocaust.center@wagner.edu

Fern Aaron Zagor is a child of two holocaust survivors. Her mother, Frieda W. Aaron, survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the death camp Majdanek, and two other labor camps until liberated by the Russians in 1945. A Civil Rights leader going with Coretta Scott King and 48 other women to the Geneva Peace Conference in 1962, Ms. Zagor’s mother earned her PhD in Comparative Literature writing about the poetry of the Ghettos and Camps in her ground-breaking work, “Bearing the Unbearable.” Ms. Zagor’s father, Sol Aaron, escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and fought with his friend Abba Kovner in the Rudnicki Forests. Fern’s aunt, Estelle Glaser Laughlin, is a well-known speaker for the US Holocaust Museum. Her memoire, “Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust” served as a guide to Ms. Zagor’s trip to Eastern Europe in 2019 to track her Holocaust roots. In November 2020 she spoke about her trip in her presentation found at: Fern Zagor: Resistance, Resilience & Hope - YouTube.

Ms. Zagor is a member of the Wagner College Holocaust Center and is the Chair of the Chai Society. Working with Dr. Lori Weintrob and others at Wagner College, she has been involved in many initiatives that focus on combatting anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred and racial injustice including the establishment of the WCHC Education and Action Gallery which officially opened on April 7, 2022

Ms. Zagor is a social worker. She has a distinguished career of more than four decades serving in senior management capacities in behavioral health and human services and as the CEO of the Staten Island Mental Health Society. Since June 2019 Ms. Zagor has been the principal consultant at, Fern Zagor Consulting LLC.