Genocide studies programs

These visas came at a high price: one child would need to be left behind. Left with an antisemitic uncle in a destitute Hungarian village, five-year-old "Juditka" had to cope with not only her parent's apparent desertion, but questions about her real identity and what it means to be a Jew.

Judy documented her story in the heartrending book, Girl Left Behind. Judy Temes teaches middle school humanities in Seattle's Torah Day School and is a former business reporter. Next year, Carla Peperzak Middle School will invite its students to draw inspiration from its namesake, a woman who fought the Nazis to save Jewish people during the Holocaust.

At the age of 18, Carla Peperzak joined the Dutch resistance. She helped save her aunt, uncle, and two cousins, hiding them at a farmhouse in the Dutch countryside. Later, disguised as a German nurse, Carla rescued her young cousin from a deportation train.

Throughout the war, she continued to secure hiding places for Jews, published an underground newspaper, and created fake identification papers and ration cards. While Carla and her immediate family survived the Holocaust, 18 members of her family did not. Among the many critical social issues that have filled the headlines over the past years, the push for financial reparations to address the enduring legacy of American slavery among some activists has become a hot-button topic that has garnered much debate.

While it is impossible to settle such a complex matter, what ideas might Jewish text offer us in our wrestling with such a complex issue? Kendell Pinkney is a Brooklyn based theatre-maker, Jewish-life consultant, and rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Y, and Two River Theatre, to name a few. Join Tom Ikeda, executive director of Densho , an organization dedicated to preserving, educating, and sharing the story of World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans, who will share a brief history of anti-Asian hate in the United States.

Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho. Tom is a sansei third-generation Japanese American who was born and raised in Seattle. In addition to leading the organization over the last 24 years, Tom has conducted more than video-recorded, oral history interviews with Japanese Americans, receiving numerous awards for his community and historical contributions.

The Bielski Partisans bravely achieved the largest armed rescue of Jews by Jews during the Holocaust and have grown to tens of thousands of descendants around the world. She will share her discoveries about her legacy which has taken her on a worldwide journey from Brooklyn to Belarus and has helped her build a rich family archive that provides uniquely personal insights into the inspirational heroes and survivors of the Bielski Partisans.

Sharon Rennert is a television editor, independent filmmaker, swing dancer, and public speaker. She has been editing documentary and reality programs for over twenty-five years and is an active member of American Cinema Editors and the Motion Picture Editors Guild. She shares the Bielski story whenever possible to help honor the memory of her grandparents and pass this important part of Jewish history on through the generations.

Join us for this special edition of our Tuesday Lunch-and-Learn program. With more than entries from 55 schools, we'll meet the winners of this year's Holocaust Writing, Art, and Film contest--the students who are carrying on the stories of the Holocaust and transforming this history into action. Learn about what inspired them and join us in celebrating their work. One lesson we have learned from the Holocaust is the terrible cost of complicity.

We know what happens when good people choose to look the other way in the face of hatred and bigotry. In , how can we overcome our own tendencies to remain silent when encountering examples of prejudice and bias?

Join us to examine a framework for active allyship, along with strategies for engaging in conversations that lead to meaningful connections with others. Prior to consulting, she was Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Pacific NW for 15 years, where she addressed antisemitism and other forms of prejudice and bigotry throughout a five-state region.

Ernie was a 3-year-old Jewish child growing up in The Hague, Netherlands in when his parents made the heart-wrenching choice to place him into hiding without them. This begins a miraculous tale of survival and sacrifice set against the horror and tragedy of the Holocaust. Interwoven with the past, Ernst takes us on an emotional journey to revisit the sites of his experiences as a hidden child. Michael Kleven and Elke Hautala are performing artists who decided to step behind the camera.

They have created over 15 film projects together from short form promotional to music videos to feature documentaries. This story highlights the urgency of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive and passing on this legacy from generation to generation. Seattle attorney Steve Pruzan is a long way from his grandparents' farm in Germany, yet he feels a deep responsibility to keep their story of escape to the United States alive. Their grandson, Steve Pruzan will share their story of discrimination, escape, tenacity, and eventually rebuilding.

Steve, a Legacy Speaker on the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau, has done extensive research on their lives in Germany and presents primary sources that reveal just how lucky they were to escape and immigrate to the United States.

She is also a competitive equestrian. Watch the Video Recording. Even though they had fled Rwanda years prior to its civil war, the far-reaching events of the war and genocide still had deep impacts on Paul Karemera and his family.

Paul tells the story of his family in Rwanda and Uganda, the history of Rwandan conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi people, and the events of the genocide in Rwanda. They belonged to the Tutsi tribe — the group targeted in the Rwandan genocide. As a young student, Paul was harassed and bullied as an outsider in Uganda, despite having been born there.

Many friends and family had not survived. Gacaca courts for restorative justice were instituted, but many Hutu perpetrators were never apprehended. Join the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees MFA to learn about the humanitarian crisis confronting the women of Syria in the 10th year of the brutal civil war. Schill Foundation for sponsoring this presentation.

Over the past 15 years of studying genocide and mass atrocities, Marie Berry has interviewed more than women who have survived unfathomable horrors in places like Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While many told stories of fear, loss, and pain, what sticks with her today is how so many women also described loving deeply, finding humor, building communities, and not only surviving, but even thriving during and after the violence.

In this talk, Dr. Berry will show how during periods of mass atrocity, human beings have long resisted through solidarity, art, non-violent direct action, and other creative strategies to reclaim their humanity together. These forms of everyday resistance are critical for us to understand to improve our ability to stop genocide and other mass atrocities going forward. Remembering the 6 million Jewish people and the millions of Non-Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust. Featuring special guests Ingrid Steppic and Maud Dahme.

Ingrid and Maud met when they were young girls - one Jewish and seeking refuge from the Nazis, the other part of a family helping to hide Jewish people. Bring a candle and turn on your camera to join the community candle lighting ceremony. You will have the option of including a name or names when you register for the event. America and the Holocaust series: Part Three of Three. But a closer examination of relations between members of these two parties illustrate a much more nuanced, and on occasion contentious, series of interactions—ranging from aid and support to outright antisemitism and hostility.

These ever-changing relations were often influenced by external world events and political shifts, which affected the status of Jewish Displaced Persons within American-controlled centers. Thank you to our community partners on this week's program: Amnesty International Group 4. America and the Holocaust series: Part Two of Three. Isenberg describes the inventive measures Fry took to save more than 2, people, far more than the intellectuals, scientists, writers, and artists he had originally been assigned to aid.

Convening a network of people to assist him, Fry was able to arrange escapes from internment camps, forge documents, and bribe officials to spirit away to safety people threatened by the Nazis.

In , his efforts were recognized as he became the first American to be honored by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among the Nations.

America and the Holocaust series: Part One of Three. Northeastern University Journalism Professor Laurel Leff will discuss why The Times decided to bury the story of the murder of Europe's Jews and how that fateful decision affected contemporary understandings of the cataclysmic event.

Speaker Amos N. Guiora, Professor of Law at the S. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. In addressing the bystander from the perspective of a crime of omission, one of the most important questions is whether we are examining a legal or ethical dilemma. Professor Amos Guiora proposes that the most appropriate lens is that of a strict legal examination. Others suggest this is an ethical dilemma rather than a legal dilemma. In his lecture, Professor Guiora will address this conflict by presenting the competing tensions between law and ethics.

Professor Guiora has an A. D from Leiden University. He has published extensively both in the United States and Europe on issues related to national security, limits of interrogation, religion and terrorism, the limits of power, multiculturalism, and human rights. A city of 6 million at that time, the Haas family arrived in Shanghai without funds, in a temperature of degrees Fahrenheit, and encountered an entirely foreign culture and now under Japanese occupation.

Together, Henry and Kate, with the use of photos, maps, and historic family documents, tell the story. Henry and his late mother Gerda, who lived to age 98, told this story for many years to school classes and other groups in the Tacoma area. A true story of how one Polish Catholic teenager saved over a dozen Jews during the Holocaust. Irene received international recognition for her actions during the Holocaust while working for a high-ranking German official.

Irene's story became a Broadway play in the nationally acclaimed production "Irena's Vow" and her memoir, "In My Hands" is used in classrooms across the country.

She resides in Washington state with her husband, Gary, and is the mother of three, a foster parent, a grandmother of five, and surrogate mother to dozens more. Jeannie travels sharing her mother's story with groups across the U. The story she shares speaks to the horrors and hate of the Holocaust—but also brings a message of faith, love, and hope, that good can triumph over evil. It proclaims the conviction that one by one, we can say no to hatred, persecution, and prejudice.

When 3-year-old Joshua Gortler and his family were forced from their hometown in Poland during World War II, they scrambled for safety border over the border, finding refuge at last in Europe's Displaced Persons Camps. Undocumented and unschooled, Gortler spent his adolescence learning to survive. When his family eventually relocated to the U. After earning a Master's degree in social work, Josh moved to Seattle and worked at the Kline Galland Jewish nursing home for almost 50 years.

He began telling his story when his grandchildren asked what happened to him during the Holocaust, and he is now an active member of the Holocaust Center for Humanity's Speakers Bureau and Board of Directors. Josh Gortler's memoir, Among the Remnan ts , was published in January From Darrell: "Our traditional Lummi song and dance group included several of his grandchildren, and was formed as a response to rapid colonial settlement which included making illegal the traditional Coast Salish cultural practices including song, dance, language, and gatherings such as the potlatch.

I lead the projects based upon lifetime relationships with many elders and spiritual leaders within the Coast Salish Territory and have grown close to many of the elders through the development of Children of the Setting Sun Production content. Watch Video Recording. Chief Seattle wrote nothing down during his life, yet his words—both real and imagined—are known throughout the world. The result is a man-made up of both historical and fictional aspects, from which conflicting messages can be gleaned.

David Buerge, a historian, teacher, and writer, has been researching the pre- and early history of the City of Seattle since the mids. He has published fourteen books of history and biography. Born in Germany, Charlotte Wollheim remembers a happy childhood. All of this began to change when the Nazi party came to power in As Jewish people's lives became increasingly threatened, her parents sent Charlotte and her sister to the Esslingen Jewish Orphanage while they tried to find a way out of Germany.

Not even 10 years old, it was a frightening experience. Charlotte's family made it to the United States, but not before her father was arrested multiple times, her grandfather's home was vandalized, and their lives were endangered. In , Charlotte teamed up with Holocaust survivor Vladka Meed to organize summer trips to Poland for teachers to learn about the Holocaust.

These trips became a turning point for hundreds of educators in their understanding and commitment to Holocaust education. Charlotte is a member of the Holocaust Center's Speakers Bureau. Photo by Stefanie Felix. When students signed up for Professor Rawan Arar's "Genocide and Law" class at the UW, they quickly learned that this class was going to tackle more than text - it was going to challenge their emotions and their human understanding.

The situations they would be studying were not just events, but were real people's lives. Working with the Holocaust Center for Humanity, students were assigned to interview survivors of genocide and their descendants. In this special program, students will join with the survivors to provide a candid view of interviewing, being interviewed, and the lessons learned. Paulina's drawing is inspired by a survivor of the Cambodian genocide.

Seattle author David Laskin draws on his award-winning book The Family to recount the story of the three branches of his mother's Russian-Jewish family: one branch immigrated to the United States and went into business, founding the fabulous Maidenform Bra Company; one branch journeyed to Palestine and made the desert bloom as idealistic Zionist pioneers; the third branch remained behind and perished in the Holocaust.

Laskin illustrates the talk with vivid slides not only of his relatives but of the historic events they experienced. Born in Brooklyn, David Laskin grew up on Long Island hearing stories of struggle and survival told by his Russian-Jewish immigrant grandparents.

Settling in Seattle with his wife and three daughters in , Laskin has won wide acclaim for his journalism and his narrative nonfiction books recounting the lives of ordinary people caught up in the great movements of history. You can purchase The Family from our community partner and local bookseller, Madison Books!

During a dinner party in Florence a few years ago, Daniel Lee was told a very strange story; a guest recounted how her mother had recently taken an armchair to an upholsterer in Amsterdam. The papers belonged to Dr.

Robert Griesinger, a lawyer from Stuttgart, who joined the S. An expert in the history of the Holocaust, Lee was fascinated to know what part Griesinger had played in the Third Reich and how his most precious documents ended up hidden inside a chair, hundreds of miles from Prague and Stuttgart. He lives in north London. Knute Berger's journalism has exposed much of the Northwest's local history and has been featured in numerous publications.

He is currently the editor at large for Crosscut, and has previously served as editor for Seattle Weekly and Seattle Magazine. I was too young to be in the convent, so I was hidden with a Catholic family, a couple [with] no children. They pretended I was a cousin from the countryside. Agi Day was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on May 13, When the Nazis invaded that country in , she and her family fled, walking miles to Budapest, Hungary. Later, her family was hidden in a convent, but Agi, too young for the convent, was sent to live with two different Catholic families who passed her off as their cousin from the countryside.

Agi was not reunited with her family until after liberation, May 1, Agi immigrated to Toronto, Canada in and later to the Seattle area. With Dr. For many communities, a Holocaust museum represents a rare space to discuss hatred, prejudice, and apathy openly. In the last few years, Holocaust Museum Houston has created an opportunity to amplify diverse voices and narratives that are not commonly recognized.

In this presentation, Dr. Michelle Tovar will discuss the significance of Latinx representation in Holocaust museums and how the work she has done has helped shape programming, exhibits, and cross-cultural engagement. Michelle Tovar is responsible for building bridges between the Latino community and the Holocaust Museum Houston. Ada van Esso was born in Holland to a Jewish family. He bribed officials who were to assist them in their escape, but the family was betrayed.

They were sent to a prison in Berlin, and then deported to Auschwitz in Ada left Auschwitz in on a death march. After the war, Ada returned to Holland and married Hans van Dam. Ine and her family moved to the Pacific Northwest at age 9.

Ada lives in Seattle in an assisted living facility. Ine visits her often from her home in Centralia, WA, and still speaks to her mother in Dutch. Photo: Ine-Marie van Dam with her mother Ada. Watson, the founder of IBM. Clyde Ford went in search of an answer. What began as a story about his father, soon enlarged into a cautionary tale about the dark side of high technology and recommendation about what must change.

Clyde W. Ford is an award-winning author of 12 works of fiction and non-fiction. Clyde lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Joe Lewinsohn was born in Berlinchen, Germany on May 16, His father Edwin and 10, other Jewish men were arrested and spent weeks in Buchenwald, a German concentration camp. In , scared for their lives, the Lewinsohns fled Germany for Shanghai, their only option.

When the war ended, they went to Chile to live alongside over 10, Jews who had spent the wartime years there. In , Joe and his family came to Seattle. Joe graduated from Garfield High School and joined the Army. Upon his discharge, he attended the University of Washington and began a teaching career in the Seattle School District. Hana Kern , the daughter of Theresienstadt survivor Tom Lenda, shares her father's experiences.

Tom Lenda was one of the very few Jewish children to survive the camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Three years after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia on March 15, , Tom and his family were ordered to take one suitcase each and report to Exhibition Hall in Prague where over 1, Jewish people had been rounded up by Nazi authorities. From there they were taken by train to Terezin Theresienstadt , a concentration camp 40 miles north of Prague.

The family was separated after their arrival at Terezin and, contrary to Nazi propaganda attempting to show that this was a desirable Jewish settlement, they endured severe overcrowding, rats, straw beds, poverty and illness, as well as the deportations of so many to Auschwitz.

His daughter Hana Kern now shares his story. The Genocide Studies Program maintains and displays digital copies of the unaltered original versions of these photographs among the extensive archives in its online Cambodian Genocide Data Bases.

We do so with the express permission of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, which allows the GSP to display the prisoner photographs, but not to give permission to third parties to reproduce them. We have had no contact with Mr. Students regularly convene with faculty in small, intimate gatherings, debating critical questions that matter. Scholarships and project stipends are available.

Most students complete the program in 18 to 24 months. What You Learn. Investigate transitional justice, social policy, anti-Semitism and the sociology of global oppression Take part in face-to-face encounters with degree candidates from across the United States and countries overseas Create curricula for schools at local and state levels Work with visiting scholars and graduate faculty who are noted leaders in their fields Gain the skills to curate museum exhibitions and sites of conscience Study government and its role in human rights and social justice issues You become prepared to launch a rewarding career as an interpreter of genocide and its global repercussions.

Admission Requirements If you have admissions questions, contact Graduate Admissions at gradadmissions kean. Also available Kean Ocean. Other programs you might be interested in Communication Studies M. Educational Administration M.

Sarah Coykendall ' Beyond the Classroom At Kean, we believe learning and professional growth extend far beyond the walls of our classrooms. Students present papers at national conferences, including the Annual Scholars Conference and the Annual Millersville University Holocaust and Genocide Studies conference.

The Justice After Atrocity Network comprises a small group of scholars and activists. The network plans and promotes gatherings, scholarship, and professional appointments relating to all areas of justice. There are opportunities for internships and fellowships, including at NGOs and other human rights organizations.

After Kean Our graduates have exciting and rewarding careers in: Human rights and public policy Non-governmental organizations NGOs Holocaust resource centers and human rights institutes Museums and other sites of conscience Government agencies Journalism and news media Education Education policy Business and global economic policy.

Students in the program. Average class size. Age of students. Conferences and Events The Holocaust and Genocide Studies program maintains an online Justice After Atrocity social network with announcements about conferences and events email JusticeAfterAtrocity kean. John LeStrange ' Want to Know More?