CHGS Events, Fall 2024

Explore our Holocaust and Genocide Educator Programs

All times given in Eastern Standard Time
All events are free and open to the public.

For more information write to holgen@ramapo.edu.

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Jacob Ari Labendz, CHGS Director
“Jews are What Jews Eat: Community Construction, Social Belonging & Jewish Food”
September 12, 2024 at 7:00 pm at the Westwood Free Public Library
Lifelong Learning Lectures

Register Here

Join CHGS Director Dr. Jacob Ari Labendz for an exploration of how Jews and non-Jews have sought to mark the essence and social boundaries of Jewishness through food—from cultivation, through preparation, to consumption. Topics will include Judaism’s complex system of laws and traditions around food, attempts to police community boundaries and assert the nature of Jewish difference through food restrictions (or their inversion), inter-communal and intra-Jewish tensions as expressed through contests over food, and the rising trend of Jewish veganism. No experience necessary.

Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz coedited a book of essays from scholars, rabbis, and activists, Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions (SUNY Press, 2019).

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“Hunger and the Holocaust”
Dr. Helene Sinnreich, University of Tennessee Knoxville

October 9, 2024 at 6:30 via Zoom
Register for Zoom in Advance

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as ‘useless eaters,’ and denied them sufficient food for survival. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. In this talk, we will explore their stories, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors. (This book is open-source. Click on the photo for access.)

Helene Sinnreich is professor and head of the Department Religious Studies and Director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Sinnreich serves as the co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press). Dr. Sinnreich has served as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. (2007), Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2009) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest (2023). Her monograph The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow Ghettos during World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2023) focuses on hunger and starvation in three ghettos in Poland during the Holocaust. She is also the editor of A Story of Survival: The Lodz Ghetto Diary of Heinek Fogel (Yad Vashem Press, 2015). Dr. Sinnreich is a scholar of European Jews during the Holocaust and employs a gender lens in much of her work. She has several current research projects including a study of public health in ghettos; a book on a series of selections at Auschwitz; and an examination of religious Jewish representations of Holocaust experience.

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Discussing Hate in the Digital Age:
Jewish Perspectives on the Politics of Antisemitism in Contemporary Austria
Dr. Tim Corbett, Austrian Academy of Arts and Sciences

October 23, 2024 at 4:30 pm in Foundation Hall, Wagner College
Register in Advance to Join via Zoom

This program has been organized by the Wagner College Holocaust Center

Dr. Tim Corbett, is an award-winning historian, writer, translator, and editor based in Vienna, Austria. His research and publishing activities focus on modern Austrian history and the former Habsburg Empire, with a particular focus on Vienna’s Jewish history. He is currently affiliated as a research associate with the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and serve as a permanent member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Austrian Society for the Study of Exile. He. has held numerous fellowships and visiting positions at institutions around the world including the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Center for Jewish History in New York, Vienna University and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

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Foundational Concepts: Genocide
Dr. A. Dirk Moses, CUNY

October 29, 2024 at 6:30 PM in Trustees Pavilion-1
Please email holgen@ramapo.edu to reserve parking.

One of today’s foremost scholars of genocide, Dr. A. Dirk Moses (CUNY) will introduce the concept of “genocide” and lead attendees in a discussion of the questions, challenges, and trends which are leading scholars to rethink and reframe the concept for the twenty-first century.

This program is part of our “Foundational Concepts” series. Throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, leading and engaging scholars will help us reflect on some of the core ideas, themes, and theories that structure contemporary work in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. Our primary concern will be the history of these concepts and their adaption for the twenty-first century.

A. Dirk Moses is the Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY. Raised in Brisbane, Australia, he was educated at the there, Scotland, and in the US. Before coming to City College, he taught at UNC Chapel Hill and the University of Sydney. He is the author and editor of books on genocide, memory and intellectual history. He edits the Journal of Genocide Research. More at www.dirkoses.com.

Interested readers may with to purchase Dr. Moses’ 2021 book, The Problems of Genocide.

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NJ-Area Memorial Scroll Gathering 2024

November 3, 2024
Temple Beth Tikvah — Wayne, NJ

Click Here to Reserve Your Place and for More Information
Tickets are free of charge. We suggest a donation of $10/individual and $18/family

This gathering is open to the public with advanced registration. It features congregations and organizations in NJ and southern NY that care for a Czech Holocaust Torah Scroll (or multiples) from the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Synagogues and organizations with Czech Memorial Scrolls that have not yet confirmed their participation should email gathering@scrollgatheringnj.org or submit this online form.

Synagogues and organizations interested in learning more about their scroll’s community of origin and developing educational programming around it should contact the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Ramapo College: holgen@ramapo.edu / 201-684-7409

Co-organizers: Temple Beth Tikvah (TBT), Wayne; the Rabbi Israel S. Dresner Center for Collaborative Programs and Learning at TBT, and the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Please email gathering@scrollgatheringnj.org with any questions that you may have.

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Why We Need an LGBT History of the Holocaust:
The Romeo and Juliet of Wartime Prague
Dr. Anna Hájková, University of Warwick (UK) and University of Michigan

November 7, 2024 at 6:30 pm in in Trustees Pavilion-1
Please email holgen@ramapo.edu to reserve parking.

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Mischlinge Exposé
A Multimedia Performance by Carolyn Enger
In Commemoration of Kristallnacht

November 11, 2024 at 7:00 pm
Beth Haverim Shir Shalom
280 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah

The Mischlinge Exposé weaves a multimedia tapestry around a little-known aspect of the Holocaust: the Mischlinge (a derogatory Nazi term for those neither fully Jewish nor fully Aryan). Interweaving video and audio testimony from Carolyn’s godmother and her father (both labeled Mischling, Grade A by the Nazis), with the music of composers from the salon period who converted to Christianity in the decades before the war, and works reacting to questions of identity after the war, the program vividly illustrates what it was like to be between worlds in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. Through the telling of her family story, Ms. Enger’s live documentary The Mischlinge Exposé directly addresses universally significant issues of identity and inclusion, encouraging empathy, tolerance, and engagement.

Internationally celebrated American pianist Carolyn Enger has gained critical acclaim for her exquisite lyrical playing and her deeply felt interpretations. In addition to an active performance schedule on two continents, Ms. Enger has enjoyed remarkable success as a recording artist: The New York Times selected her Naxos recording of intimate Ned Rorem miniatures, Piano Album I & Six Friends, as one of the newspaper’s “Best In Classical Recordings”, writing “Among the 90th birthday tributes this year to the essential American composer Ned Rorem, this recording especially stands out,” while Gramophone declared, “Enger raises the miniatures to a higher level.” Recently the recording was “Album of the Week” on Sirius XM’s Symphony Hall and was featured on their program Living American. Her latest recording Resonating Earth is set to be released in September 2024. (Complete biography.)

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Native American Heritage Month Banquet

November 22, 2024 in the York Room

The CHGS was a proud supporting co-sponsor of this year’s Native American Heritage Month Banquet, which featured Chief Dwaine Perry of the Ramapough Munsee Lunaape Nation (a new member of our advisory board) and Chief Carla Alexander of the Ramapough Munsee Lunaape Nation’s Deer Clan.

Organized and sponsored by Ramapo College Anthropology, Prof. James Pascal and Prof. Neriko Doerr.

More information and photos here.

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Foundational Concepts: Refugees and Human Rights
Dr. Carly Goodman, Rutgers University

November 25, 2024 at 6:30 pm in Friends Hall
Please email holgen@ramapo.edu to reserve parking.

After World War II, nations around the world developed a framework to define what it meant to be a “refugee” and provide for refugee rights and protections. In this talk, Goodman will discuss how the U.S. resettled refugee groups during the Cold War, at times in alignment with the international framework, and at others, straying from it to serve U.S. political aims. With the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, the U.S. committed to ongoing resettlement of refugees and to other human rights principles. In practice however, the U.S. treatment and reception of refugees and asylum seekers have been shaped by political factors and considerations beyond, and sometimes at odds with, obligations under U.S. and international law.

This program is part of our “Foundational Concepts” series. Throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, leading and engaging scholars will help us reflect on some of the core ideas, themes, and theories that structure contemporary work in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. Our primary concern will be the history of these concepts and their adaption for the twenty-first century.

Carly Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University-Camden. Her book Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (UNC Press, 2023) received the First Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. She serves as senior editor of Made by History at TIME Magazine, (formerly at the Washington Post).

 

 

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Previous Programs

Lectures and Programs, 2023-2024

Lectures and Programs, 2022-2023