Holocaust (Video)

As a child, Gabriella Karin was separated from her parents and placed in a Slovakian convent for three years. Although physically safe, she did not emerge unscathed. Suppressed memories of her past came flooding back once she began to fashion sculptures related to the Holocaust later in life. Her journey offers important insight into trauma and how creativity can be used as a tool to process memories of oppression, persecution, and loss. Karin is a docent at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and participates in the Righteous Conversations Project, which unites survivors and students through art. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 36071]

In his new book, Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Drawing on a number of case studies such as radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial, videotapes of Holocaust survivor testimonies, and the recent use of digital platforms for holographic witnessing, he demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds the traumatic condition itself. His insights have crucial implications for media studies and the digital humanities field as they provide new ways to understand the relationship between technology and human suffering. Pinchevski is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Series: "Library Channel" [Show ID: 35017]

Yale University professor and filmmaker Charles Musser explores the historical and contemporary perspectives of race relations in German and American cinema from the 1920s by examining The Ancient Law (1923) and The Jazz Singer (1927). He evaluates how each film addresses anti-Semitism as well as the burning question of the history of blackface as a theatrical convention. Series: "Library Channel" [Show ID: 35016]

As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past. In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. She combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Series: "Writers" [Show ID: 35015]

Archivist Regina Longo (Brown University) joins UCSB’s Harold Marcuse (Department of History) for a discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s final film Shoah: Four Sisters (2018), a four-part miniseries that was screened over two days at the Pollock Theater. Longo’s work includes extensive restoration of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary footage of testimonials from the Holocaust, and in conversation with Marcuse she offers deeper insight into the history of the film and the women it concerns. Longo explains how Lanzmann’s Shoah was initially funded and produced, how hundreds of hours of footage is being carefully restored from original prints and made available online, and how Four Sisters both influences and is situated in a legacy of film, legal testimony, memoir, and other post-war efforts to represent the un-representable horror of the Shoah. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34842]

Despite the explosive growth of Holocaust studies, scholars of Nazi Germany and the Shoah long neglected gender as an analytical category. It wasn’t until 1984 when the essay collection When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany raised awareness of women’s experiences under fascism. It explored women’s double jeopardy as females and as Jews. In this lecture, Marion Kaplan, one of the editors the publication, takes the audience on a historical tour of her research, from the first workshops raising questions to the first publications providing answers. Since then, the gender perspective has provided significant insight into our understanding of Jewish life in Nazi Germany and during the Holocaust. Kaplan concludes her talk with a forward look at new areas of research that highlight women’s and gender studies. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34018]

The suite of international conventions and declarations about genocide, human rights, and refugees after the WWII is known as the “human rights revolution.” It is regarded as humanizing international affairs by implementing the lessons of the Holocaust. In this presentation, Dirk Moses, Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, questions this rosy picture by investigating how persecuted peoples have invoked the Holocaust and made analogies with Jews to gain recognition as genocide victims. Such attempts rarely succeed and have been roundly condemned as cheapening the Holocaust memory, but how and why does genocide recognition require groups to draw such comparisons? Does the human rights revolution and image of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic genocide humanize postwar international affairs as commonly supposed? Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 34019]

What does it mean to be born in a concentration camp, arguably one of the most inhospitable places on earth? Eva Clarke was one of three “miracle babies” who saw the light of day in KZ Mauthausen in Austria. Nine days after her birth, the Second World War ended. As a newborn, Eva’s chances of survival were extremely slim; against all odds, she lived, making her and her mother Anka the only survivors of their extended family. In 1948, they emigrated from Prague to the UK and settled in Cardiff, Wales. Eva regularly addresses audiences, and her remarkable story has been featured in the British and American media. She and her mother are among the protagonists of Wendy Holden’s book Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope (Harper, 2015). Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32849]

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the creation of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and its multimedia narrative exhibition honoring the lives of those who have passed. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor emerita at New York University, is also the chief curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum. She is presented here by the Jewish Studies Program and the Library at UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32848]

In describing his new book, “East West Street” author Philippe Sands looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university in a now-obscure city that had once been known as “the little Paris of Ukraine,” a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as Sands traces the mysterious story of his grandfather, as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. Sands is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop and the Library at UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 32847]

In his highly-acclaimed book, The Nazis Next Door, Eric Lichtblau tells the shocking and shameful story of how America became a safe haven for Hitler's men. Lichtblau explains here how it was possible for thousands of Nazis -- from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich -- to move to the U.S. after WWII, and quietly settle into new lives as Americans. Some of them gained entry as self-styled refugees, while others enjoyed the help and protection of the CIA, the FBI, and the military, who put them to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers. Lichtblau's book draws from once-secret government records and interviews, telling the full story of the Nazi scientists brought to America, and the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as Americans. He is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 31542]

The International Tracing Service, one of the world’s largest Holocaust-related archival repositories, holds millions of documents detailing the many forms of persecution that transpired during the Nazi era and their continuing repercussions. Based on her recently published book, "Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research," Suzanne Brown-Fleming provides new insights into human decision-making in genocidal settings, the factors that drive it, and its far-reaching consequences. Brown-Fleming is director of the Visiting Scholar Programs of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is presented here by the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 31541]

Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and German Studies at Brown University, explores the dynamics of the horrifying genocidal violence which took place in the East Galician town of Buczacz— following the German conquest of the region in 1941— and its subsequent erasure from local memory. For centuries, Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews coexisted in the region, but tragically, by the time the town was liberated in 1944, the entire Jewish population had been murdered by the Nazis. They were assisted by local Ukrainians, who then ethnically cleansed the region of the Polish population. Bartov is presented as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Humanities] [Show ID: 31540]

Eva Kor was 10 when she and her family stepped off the train in Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. Minutes later an SS officer took her and her twin sister, Miriam, away from their mother, father and two older sisters. The twins never saw the others again. Awaiting the girls was Josef Mengele, "the Angel of Death" who performed unspeakably sadistic experiments on roughly 1,500 sets of twins. When the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, Eva and Miriam were among the fewer than 200 survivors of Mengele's atrocities. Kor talks about her ordeal at the hands of Mengele and her decision to forgive. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 30962]

In his book, Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, author Joel Dimsdale draws on decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience since the Nuremberg Trials to take a fresh look at four Nazi war criminals: Robert Ley, Hermann Goring, Julius Streicher and Rudolf Hess. Dimsdale, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, is presented by the UC San Diego Library. Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30898]

Born in Jerusalem to parents who had fled Nazi Germany, Israeli journalist Tom Segev is a leading figure among the so-called New Historians, who have challenged many of Israel’s traditional narratives or “founding myths.” His books include, “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust” (2000); “One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate” (2000); “1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East” (2006); and “Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends” (2010). Segev is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a joint program of the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies Program. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30122]

Writer and artist Charlotte Salomon, the daughter of a highly cultivated Jewish family in Berlin, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered at the age of 26. In her final work “Life? or Theatre?” Salomon envisioned the circumstances surrounding the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. Darcy C. Buerkle, an Associate Professor of History at Smith College, explores Salomon’s tragic life as she discusses her remarkable book, “Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide,” as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop sponsored by UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Humanities] [Show ID: 30121]

Veteran trial attorney William L. Lerach recounts his successful class action law suits against companies that prospered by taking advantage of Holocaust victims. Series: "A Life in the Law: Illusions Lost & Lessons Learned " [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 30396]

In his book “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven For Hitler’s Men,” Eric Lichtblau investigates a trove of newly discovered documents which bring to light an unknown era post WWII. He discusses how Nazis were protected by the U.S. government to become spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29505]

Glenn Kurtz discusses his book, “Three Minutes in Poland,“ inspired by a three minute film that his grandfather had made in a predominantly Jewish town in Poland one year before WWII broke out. The book consists of interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts that tell the stories of seven survivors that lived in this town. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29614]

E. Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, is an expert in handling cases involving looted art and the recovery of property stolen by the Nazi authorities during the Holocaust. He tells the story here of his most prominent case, “Republic of Austria v. Altmann” which resulted in the successful return of six paintings by Gustav Klimt, including the “Golden Lady,” to their rightful owners. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 29174]

Since the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, Germans have been forced to confront their “unmasterable past.” What was it like to grow up in a divided country burdened with the legacy of genocide? How does one deal with the knowledge of one’s people’s complicity in mass murder, and how does this knowledge affect one’s identity? Primary witnesses of both German and Jewish backgrounds explore answers to these questions. Panelists include Frank Biess, Deborah Hertz, Margrit Frolich and Brian Schottlaender of UC San Diego. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 29486]

Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, discusses her book "The Great Escape" where she followed the lives of nine Holocaust survivors over many decades as they fled fascism by traveling to England and America. They went on to fulfill their professional destinies and change the course of 20th-century history. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 29236]

Award-winning historian Wendy Lower discusses the lives and experience of German women in the Nazi killing fields. Her study chillingly debunks the age-old myth of the German woman as mother and breeder, removed from the big world of politics and war. The women Lower labels “furies” humiliated their victims, plundered their goods, and often killed them, and like many of their male counterparts, they got away with murder. Lower is the John K. Roth professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and has published widely on the Shoah in Eastern Europe. She is presented here as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28811]

The Holocaust claimed anywhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Romani lives, a tragedy the Romani people and Sinti refer to as the Porrajmos, or “the Devouring.” Notwithstanding the scope of the catastrophe, the Romani genocide was often ignored or minimized until Ian Hancock and others exposed this misfortune. A Romani-born British citizen, activist, and scholar, Hancock has done more than anyone to raise awareness about the Romani people during World War II. Now a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Hancock is presented here as part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a partnership between Judaic Studies at UCSD and the UC San Diego Library. Series: "Library Channel" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 28100]

Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg presents an illustrated talk focusing upon five paintings by Gustav Klimt that were stolen by the Nazis from the Viennese family of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer in 1938. As a result of a landmark case that Schoenberg argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Klimt paintings, valued at over $325 million, were returned by Austria to their rightful heir in 2006. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 28044]

Forty years ago, Dr. Joel Dimsdale started researching concentration camp survivors. Little did he know where his journey of discovery would lead him. After a visit from a Nuremberg executioner, he switched from studying victims to perpetrators. His latest research is based on an analysis of Rorschach inkblot tests administered at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. Using extensive archival data, Dimsdale reviews what the Nuremberg Rorschachs can (and cannot) tell us about the Nazi mass murderers. Dimsdale is presented by the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a program sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and UC San Diego Judaic Studies Department. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24993]

What do we mean by “genocide”? Why are humans the only living creatures that kill their own kind in huge numbers? What place does the Holocaust occupy in the history of genocides? Yehuda Bauer, Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the essential similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides, particularly ones that have occurred during the last hundred years – Armenian, Cambodian, Ethiopian, Rwandan, and Darfurian Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 24017]

Award-winning historian Deborah Lipstadt gives a compelling reassessment of the groundbreaking trial that has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world in which victims of genocide confront their perpetrators. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 22435]

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian Tom Segev for a discussion of his new book, The Life and Legends of Simon Wiesenthal. The conversation focuses on the roots of Wiesenthal's passionate commitment to justice and explores his lifelong quest to convict perpetrators of genocide. Series: "Conversations with History" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 20515]

Professor Mahlendorf discusses some unexpected reader responses to her recently acclaimed memoir, “The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood”, and the ghosts they raised up for some readers and for herself. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 19388]

George J. Wittenstein, a surviving member of the White Rose, a Hitler resistance organization, discusses how history is created and defined depending on the author. He also recounts his experiences during WWII. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 17610]

Using examples from visual and print media from the 1930s, Claudia Koonz explores the moral culture that normalized state-sanctioned persecution, theft, and murder under the Nazis. Series: "Humanitas" [Humanities] [Show ID: 14963]

Holocaust survivor Leon Leyson reflects on his incredible luck that put him on the infamous “Schindler’s List,” sparing him from a disastrous fate in Nazi Germany. Series: "Osher UC San Diego Distinguished Lecture Series" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 14221]

Holocaust survivor and poet Dr. Karl O. Herz discusses his experiences as a Jewish boy growing up in Germany during the World War II. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 14515]

Shoah or Ha Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. Yale professor Geoffrey Hartman explores the universal aspect of Shoah literature in this inaugural lecture of the George J. Wittenstein lecture series which commemorates the civic courage of Dr. George J. Wittenstein, member of two resistance groups against Hitler's dictatorship. Series: "Voices" [Humanities] [Show ID: 14180]

Professor James Young, Commissioner of Germany’s National Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews, and juror for the WTC Site Memorial Competition, discusses the history of memorial projects. [Humanities] [Show ID: 14091]

This program evaluates the roles and themes of both government-inspired and populist antisemitism. Featuring Peter Kenez, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, and historian and Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This program is presented as part of the Santa Cruz Jewish Studies Lectures. [Humanities] [Show ID: 9422]

Noted Holocaust scholar, author and lecturer, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute of Jewish Culture and the Arts, and Professor of English at Indiana University, explores the changing images of the Holocaust's most famous victim over time, and attempts to explain why one particular version of Anne Frank has been favored over others. Sponsored by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 8872]

Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, discusses the multi-voiced archives which have been gathered to document the destruction of European Jewry. As faculty advisor and project director to the Fortunoff Video Archives of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, Professor Hartman has been actively involved in its growth and has written extensively about the Archive and its work. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Humanities] [Show ID: 8829]

Sir Martin Gilbert, C.B.E., is one of the 20th century’s foremost historians of World War II, the Holocaust and the founding of modern Israel. In “The Righteous—Non-Jews Who Helped Jews During the Second World War” Gilbert tells how, as the Third Reich carried out its program to exterminate European Jewry, many Gentiles risked their careers and lives to conceal and rescue Jewish refugees. His stories on the “Righteous” include such now-famous names as Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, as well as ordinary people who exercised ordinary decency in extraordinary times. [Humanities] [Show ID: 6965]

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and the rank of Grand Officer in the French Legion of Honor, Elie Wiesel is the author of more than 40 books. Using his talents as a teacher and storyteller, Wiesel defends human rights and promotes peace throughout the world. Series: "Taubman Symposia in Jewish Studies" [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 6716]