Using Holocaust films in the classroom, with Holocaust film scholar and author Rich Brownstein in conversation with Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Using Holocaust films in the classroom, with Holocaust film scholar and author Rich Brownstein in conversation with Dr. Michael Berenbaum
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
4:00pm-5:30pm ET

REGISTER

Explore the greatest narrative Holocaust film ever made while discovering the impact of Holocaust genre films.
Since 1945, more than 440 narrative Holocaust feature films and made-for-television movies have been produced, in dozens of languages by more than 40 countries. Holocaust films have spanned every conceivable theatrical style, including drama, melodrama, docudrama, comedy, farce, science fiction, time travel, live-action, animation and streaming. Holocaust films are so critically accepted that at least one has been nominated for at least one Academy Award ever other year, including 20 for Best Foreign Language Film. Still more daunting, 75 of these films have functionally disappeared. How was all this unwieldy information unified into one volume of history, analysis, pedagogy, commentary, recommendations, reviews and lists?

From Anne Frank to Schindler’s List to Jojo Rabbit, Holocaust films are put into historical and artistic perspective and are discussed through many lenses: historically, chronologically, thematically, sociologically, geographically and individually. The filmmakers behind these films are also contextualized, including Charlie Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski. This book also includes recommendations and reviews of the 50 best Holocaust films, an educational guide, and a detailed listing of each Holocaust film.

Rich Brownstein created a monumental guide to Holocaust related film, Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide, This text provides context for creative decisions, successes and failures, historical shifts, and career paths of renowned filmmakers.

Join CWB to explore the greatest narrative Holocaust films ever made and explore why so many American–produced Holocaust films have been nominated for at least one Oscar.
Rich Brownstein

A Holocaust & Jewish Film expert, Rich Brownstein has lectured for Yad Vashem’s International School of Holocaust Studies since 2014, specializing in the history and use of Holocaust films in the classrooms.
​
Rich Brownstein was born in Portland, Oregon in 1962. Most of his undergraduate work at Reed College was in psychology. By the time he graduated, three of his experiments were on their way to being published in the top social psychology journals in the world. Those studies are still being cited today. During college, too, Rich was a Sunday school teacher specializing in Holocaust education and also on the board of the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center (now the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education).

A few years after college Rich moved to Los Angeles, working with Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker Productions. Rich was the associate producer on one of David Zucker’s projects, directed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, just before they created South Park. In fact, there is a South Park character that Rich inspired.

Rich then founded The Transcription Company, starting from an apartment in Hollywood. Initially, his company transcribed the raw interviews for tabloid TV shows such as Fox’s A Current Affair, NBC’s Access Hollywood, and King World’s Inside Edition/American Journal. Eventually, every network and studio used his company, including: NPR, Oprah, ABC News, Curb Your Enthusiasm and even Playboy videos. At theend of Nightline when transcripts were offered, those were produced and processed by his company. By the time Rich sold the company in 2003 to move his family to Israel, Rich had over 100 employees and contractors.

In Israel, Rich became a professor of Jewish and Holocaust film for the Young Judaea Your Course program, accredited by the American Jewish University of Los Angeles. For a decade, Rich taught hundreds of college students during their “gap year” about film and critical reasoning. His teaching methods and theories about Holocaust films eventually came to the attention of Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies where Rich has been a lecturer since 2014, specializing in the use of narrative Holocaust films in the classroom. Thousands of educators worldwide use his methods.

Along the way Rich also sang “Louie Louie” with The Kingsmen, taught Stan Lee how to use Microsoft Word, read Shas, worked with the man who wagged the tail of the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, and Rich also accumulated the largest collection of basketball memorabilia in the world, all of it related to his beloved Portland Trail Blazers.

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.

Thank you to our Partners:
The full inclusion of people of all abilities is a core value of Classrooms Without Borders. For questions or to make requests for special accommodations contact [email protected]