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Lecture Series 2023-2024
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Rebecca Donner - All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days
Rebecca Donner
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days:
The True Story of the American Woman at
the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
September 12 | 7 p.m.
A Zoom Presentation
In her deeply researched 2021 nonfiction work, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the German Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, Rebecca Donner tells the extraordinary story of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, a young American Ph.D. student who became a leader in the largest underground anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Donner has written “a nonfiction narrative with the pace of a political thriller.”
In her acceptance speech for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Donner observed, “The men and women Mildred Harnack recruited into her underground resistance group were factory workers and office workers, artists and journalists, students and professors. While so many in Germany supported Hitler’s regime, or chose inaction, they chose to risk their lives—and resist. The story of their audacious courage serves as an inspiration to us all during this fraught time in the world.”
Rebecca Donner is the author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction and in 2022 was the recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. Born in Canada, Donner is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
Rebecca Donner is represented by The Tuesday Agency • www.tuesdayagency.com
A Year That Mattered: Varian Fry and the Refugee Crisis, 1940-41
October 17 | 7 p.m.
Beckman Hall, Room 404
A Year That Mattered: Varian Fry and the
Refugee Crisis, 1940 - 41
German victory over France in June 1940 brought new dangers for those who had sought a safe haven there from Nazi persecution. Especially alarming was the “surrender on demand” clause of the armistice which required authorities in Vichy France, the southern part of the country not occupied by Germany, to arrest any individuals the Nazi regime demanded. Thousands of Europe’s most renowned writers and artists, mostly Jews, now faced immediate threat. What could be done?They will bring their expertise to these and other still debated questions, focusing specifically on the actions of Varian Fry (1907-1967), a New York intellectual who after the fall of France to the Nazis spent a year in the southern port city of Marseilles. Defying the Nazis, the French Vichy regime and his own government, Fry led one of the most remarkable and successful rescue efforts of the Nazi era, saving some 2,000 artists, intellectuals, and anti-Nazi refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish.
Daniel Greene is Subject Matter Expert at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. In 2018, he curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened at the USHMM to commemorate its 25th anniversary.
The exhibition inspired the Emmy-nominated documetnary series The US and the Holocaust that aired on PBS in September 2022. Greene and Edward Phillips also co-edited Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader, published by Rutgers University Press in 2022. From 2019 to 2023, Greene was President and Librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Pierre Sauvage is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and President of the Chambon Foundation which he founded in 1982. Born in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, he
is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors. Sauvage is best known for his feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit which tells the story of the conspiracy of goodness in a community that saved some 5,000 Jews. Weapons of the Spirit received numerous awards, includingthe prestigious Dupont-Columbia Award in Broadcast Journalism. It continues to be one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust. Sauvage is currently at work on a major documentary on Varian Fry and his colleagues.
The John and Toby Martz Distinguished Lecture in Holocaust Studies
This event is made possible by the support of The Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation
This event is part of the series “The Holocaust and Lessons for Democracy”
Register and use the claim code RC62933
to receive free parking for this event.
An Interfaith Service of Remembrance for Kristallnacht
November 7 | 7 p.m.
Wallace All Faiths Chapel • Fish Interfaith Center
Architecture and Antisemitism Before and
After the November 9, 1938 Pogrom:
The Political Uses of Building in Nazi Germany
This year we continue our tradition of coming together as an interfaith community to remember the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, often referred to as Kristallnacht. We remember those targeted by the antisemitic violence that swept across Germany and Austria during the pogrom, and we honor the courageous few who dared to stand with the persecuted and defy
Nazi authority.
At this year’s event, Duke University scholar of art, art history, and architecture, Dr. Paul Jaskot will bring his interdisciplinary expertise to bear in exploring how spatial histories clarify the radicalization of genocidal policies.
Dr. Jaskot is chair of the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University where he is also co-director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. He is the author or co-editor of several groundbreaking books, including (co-edited with Alexandra Garbarini) New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (2018) and The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the
Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000), and dozens of articles. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Northwestern University, Dr. Jaskot is on the editorial board of the Journal of Jewish Identities and the German Studies Review and is associate editor for architectural history of Grove Art Online. From 2008 – 2010, he was president of the College Art Association. Dr. Jaskot
is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including from the Getty Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Funded in part by The Sally and Jerry Schwartz Endowment for Holocaust Education and
The John and Toby Martz Distinguished Lecture in Holocaust Studies
Co-sponsored by the Fish Interfaith Center
Register and use the claim code RC45098
to receive free parking for this event.
25th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest
March 15 at 11:00 AM (Pacific)
Join us as we recognize student and educator achievement at the 25th Annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest. This year, students focused on the theme Answering the Call of Memory: Choosing to Act.
An Evening of Holocaust Remembrance
More information to come!
