America and The Holocaust: A Series of Colloquies

Classrooms Without Borders is excited to offer the opportunity share our new series: America and The Holocaust: A Series of Colloquies.

The new PBS Documentary U.S. and the Holocaust has sparked debate over America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the 20th century.

In each of our 6 part series Dr. Michael Berenbaum will explore this complicated debate.

Each session will feature an scholar whose work will shed new light on the topic and challenge us to reframe our understanding of the complex portrait of national inaction.

February 15th 2023 featuring’s Session

A Discussion Surrounding

“Ben Hecht:The Legendary Writer Who Mobilized Hollywood on Behalf of the European Jews”  Featuring: Rick Richman

Ben Hecht was a journalist, author, essayist, screenwriter, polemicist, Zionist — and a prophet. Learn how this one-man multimedia operation sent the English language into battle on behalf of the European Jews, at their moment of greatest peril — and forced the Roosevelt Administration to respond.

Featuring: Rick Richman

Rick Richman is a resident scholar at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He has written for Commentary, Mosaic, The New York Sun, The Jewish Journal, The Jewish Press, The New York Post, PJ Media, and other publications, and is the author of Racing Against History: The 1940 Campaign for a Jewish Army to Fight Hitler (Encounter Books, 2018).

BOOK SUMMARY:

And None Shall Make Them Afraid recounts the story of how Zionism, supported by Americanism, created a modern miracle—told through the little-known stories of eight individuals who collectively changed history.

The book presents eight historic figures—four from Europe (Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Abba Eban) and four from America (Louis D. Brandeis, Golda Meir, Ben Hecht, Ron Dermer)—who reflect the intellectual and social revolutions that Zionism and Americanism brought to the world.

In some cases, the stories have been forgotten; in other cases, misrepresented; in still others, not yet given their full due. But they are central to the miraculous recovery of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. Taken together, they recount both a people’s return to its place among the nations and the impact on history that a single individual can make.

More than a century ago, after studying the early Zionist texts, Louis Brandeis concluded that Jews were the “trustees” of their history, charged to “carry forward what others, in the past, have borne so well.” The stories in this book—recording the extraordinary efforts of extraordinary individuals that created the modern state of Israel and then sustained it—reinforce Brandeis’s observation for our own time.

The story of Zionism, and its interaction with Americanism, is a continuing one. The book is thus not only about the past, but the present and future as well.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.

Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Future Sessions in this Series:

• March 15th 2023 John Sears: Refuge Must Be Given, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Holocaust.
• April, May and June Guests COMING SOON

Past Sessions:

• January 18th 2023: A conversation with award winning filmmaker Pierre Savage on Varian Fry: The First American honored as a Righteous Among the Nations of the Earth by Yad Vashem for the rescue of a Cultural Elite in Vichy France 1940-1941.

Thank you to our Partners

Founded in 1981 as a series of conferences on the Holocaust and its contemporary meaning, the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida opened its current museum in 1986, founded by Holocaust Survivor and local philanthropist, Tess Wise. Located in Maitland, just outside Orlando, the Holocaust Center attracts visitors from around the world. Its mission is to use the history and lessons of the Holocaust to build a just and caring community free of antisemitism and all forms of prejudice and bigotry. The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center will transform into the Holocaust Museum of Hope & Humanity, a lakefront museum in Downtown Orlando and the first-ever built from the ground up in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation. To learn more about the Holocaust Center, visit www.holocaustedu.org.