Carol Zemel, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at York University will present Critical Israel at CU Monday, April 16 at 7:00 pm.

Israel is a dynamic, complex, and challenging country to understand. The University of Colorado Boulder’s Hillel and the Program in Jewish Studies continue their Seeing Israel series with a look at the intersection of visual art, politics and social justice. The Seeing Israel series events are free and open to the public but RSVPs are appreciated. RSVP to Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call 303.492.7143. Additional information can be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

In its early days, Israeli art was largely described as utopian. Today, artists in Israel wrestle with critical social and political issues. Join us on Monday, April 16 at 7:00 pm for Critical Israel: Art by Yael Bartana and Roee Rosen on the CU Boulder Campus in University Memorial Center Room 235 for an evening with art historian, Carol Zemel who will focus on the acclaimed video installations Polish Trilogy…and Europe will be stunned by Yael Bartana, and Confessions of Roee Rosen by Roee Rosen. Her presentation will focus on questions of loss, rights of return, and conflicts of national identity raised by these two works by Israeli artists. Finally, she will also discuss the presentation of these artistic pieces and their meanings outside Israel for diasporic audiences.

Zemel is professor of Art History and Visual Culture at York University in Toronto. Her areas of research and publication include 19^th and 20^th century European art, the modern art market, feminism in the arts, Jewish visual culture and diaspora studies. She is an authority on the work of Vincent Van Gogh as well as the co-founder and co-director of Project Mosaica, a web-based exploration of Jewish cultural expression in the arts. Indiana University Press will publish her new book, “Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora” in late 2012. She is currently completing two books: Art in Dark Times, a study of images made by prisoners during the Holocaust, and “Right After: Chaos and Culture After World War II.”

These events have been made possible by generous donors to CU’s Hillel, the Program in Jewish Studies and the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

A bookplate from the Fingesten Collection at CU Boulder

On Wednesday March 7 at 7:00 pm Davide Stimilli, associate professor of German and Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies, will present a lecture on the life and work of Jewish-Italian bookplate artist Michel Fingesten (1884-1943).

In March 2011, Stimilli recommended the purchase of a large collection of Fingesten’s works, including 154 items, that had been assembled by an unknown collector, possibly bibliophile Fridolf Johnson, editor of the American Artist Magazine. The CU Art Museum purchased this collection with funds generously provided by donors to the Program in Jewish Studies, and the Fingesten Collection is now part of the CU Art Museum’s Permanent Collection.

Michel Fingesten (originally Michl Finkelstein) was born in 1884 in the village of Buckovice (Buczkowitz), Silesia, in the Habsburg Empire, now part of the Czech Republic, from a Czech-Jewish father and an Italian-Jewish mother, and died in 1943 in Cerisano, Southern Italy, after the liberation by the allies of the camp in which he had been interned since 1941. He was one of the most original and productive graphic artists and bookplate designers of the twentieth century, especially noted for his Surrealist and Cubist influenced prints and paintings that capture the darkening mood of Europe associated with Fascism, Nazism, and World War II.

This lecture will introduce the work of this extraordinary artist and the collection at the CU Art Museum. Selections from the Fingesten Collection are on view at the CU Art Museum Lobby through March 9. The CU Art Museum will be open until 7:00 pm on Wednesday, March 7 to allow for viewing prior to the lecture.

Charming Hostess Performs at CU March 8 at 7:30 PM

On Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 pm in the ATLAS Center Black Box Theater we are excited to present a rockin’ performance with the “nerdy-sexy-commie-girly” band, Charming Hostess. Their music has been described as both physical and intellectual, using voices, vocal percussion, handclaps, heartbeats, sex-breath and silence to explore such topics as the Bosnian genocide in their album Sarajevo Blues and the political/erotic nexus of Walter Benjamin and his Marxist muse in Trilectic. Both of these works were released on John Zorn’s Radical Jewish series on Tzadik. L.A. Weekly described Charming Hostess “as the finest anarchist-feminist-polyphonic-polyrhythmic-polymorphously perverse-balkan-blue-ish-Jewish-freak-funk-punk band working in America today. Their live shows are as fabulous and eccentric as their music.”

This special Purim performance with Charming Hostess is inspired by the life and work of the Italian anti-facists Natalia and Leone Ginzburg.  Exploring their journeys of love, resistance, exile and liberation, this concert will feature new music composed and developed from the writings of the Ginzburgs as well as from the Italian regional traditions of Turin, Abruzzo and Rome, places central to their lives. This performance will also feature music from Italian Jewish liturgy, the oldest and most remote in Europe, as well as anti-fascist songs, and work chants to resistance anthems. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for general public in advance or $15 at the door.  Tickets can be purchased on-line at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/226563. This concert will be held in the ATLAS Center Black Box Theater.  Seating is limited.  We are also excited to announce this concert has been selected to be taped for a joint production between the ATLAS Center and Colorado’s Public Broadcast System.

For questions or additional information, contact the Program in Jewish Studies at 303.492.7143 or via email at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu. Complete details about CU’s Week of Jewish Culture can also be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu

This year’s series is presented in conjunction with the community collaborative: Movers: Art and Conscience (www.jewishmovers.org) and examines visual culture with a focus on Italian Jewish culture. 

As we have every year, CU’s Program in Jewish Studies is proud to be highlighting the most cutting edge forms of Jewish culture with an examination of Italian Jewish culture, an area not widely known or discussed,”

said David Shneer, director of the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder. This year’s series is supported by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support of the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by the Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

Upcoming programs:

Friday, March 2 @ 12 PM

“”Memorializing the Persecution of Gay Men and Lesbians in Nazi Germany: Whom are we Remembering and Why Did It Take So Long?” with David Shneer, professor of History and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at CU Boulder
Colorado State University, Fort Collins campus
As part of its year-long theme on visual culture, Professor Shneer will be bringing images of memorials to the Nazi persecution of gay men and lesbians. In this talk, he will outline the history of gays and lesbians in Nazi Germany and beyond, and then focus on how this tragedy was memorialized.

Friday, March 2 @ 6 PM
“Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust”
Congregation Har Shalom
725 West Drake Road Fort Collins, CO
David Shneer’s book, “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust” examines the lives and works of two dozen Jewish photographers who were empowered by the Soviet state to photograph World War II and the Holocaust. Shneer examines how Jews came to be the “documentors of the revolution” and what they did when they were confronted with a war that targeted them as Soviets and as Jews. A slideshow of the internationally traveling photography exhibit that compliments the book will be available for viewing prior to the presentation. Copies of “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” will be available for sale and signing by Professor Shneer.

David Shneer is professor of History and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley and has been called a “taboo-breaking scholar” by Tikkun magazine and “a new Jewish superhero,” by Jewcy magazine. Professor Shneer’s work concentrates on modern Jewish society and culture, especially Yiddish culture, Russian Jewish history, and Jews and sexuality. His books include “Queer Jews,” finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, “Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture,” finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and “New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora.” “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” was a finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award.

Wednesday, March 7 @ 7 PM

Fingesten Bookplate from CU Boulder Collection

Ginzburg Geography Display with visiting artist Jewlia Eisenberg followed by
“The Life and Work of Michel Fingesten ” with Davide Stimilli, associate professor of German, Comparative Literature and Humanities at CU Boulder
Black Box Theater in ATLAS on the CU campus
The Fingesten Collection is on view from Monday, February 27 through Friday, March 9 in the CU Art Museum lobby.

Jewlia Eisenberg will display and demonstrate the final results of the Ginzburg community mapping project which concludes with a dramatic art installation and presentation in the ATLAS Black Box Theater. This will be followed by a special lecture with CU professor, Davide Stimilli on the “Life and Work of Michel Fingesten.”

Michel Fingesten was born in 1883 in Buczkowitz, Silesia, and died in 1943 in Cerisano, Southern Italy, after the liberation by the allies of the camp in which he had been interned since 1940. Fingesten was one of the most productive and highly appreciated bookplate designers of the twentieth century, but the story of his tragic life still awaits to be told. His extraordinary work still lacks the wide public recognition that it deserves. The lecture will introduce this great artist and the collection that the CU Art Museum has recently purchased thanks to the generous support of donors to the Program for Jewish Studies.

Davide Stimilli is associate professor of German and Comparative Literature and Humanities. Prior to teaching at CU-Boulder, he held positions in Italian and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University and in Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. He has written extensively on Franz Kafka and Aby Warburg. His interests include literary criticism & theory, intellectual history, and art theory.

Note: The 9 pm Charming Hostess Concert on Thursday, March 8 has been cancelled. Tickets are still available for the 7:30 pm concert.

Events will take place in venues on the CU-Boulder campus as well as the CSU Fort Collins campus. Complete details can be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu. Many events have limited seating so RSVP’s are suggested. For additional questions, contact the Program in Jewish Studies at 303.492.7143 or via email at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu.

The Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder provides an interdisciplinary curriculum for students who wish to learn more about Jewish culture, history, society, and religion. Under the guidance of a distinguished faculty, the program offers a wide range of courses on the Jewish experience in the global arena. For more information, visit jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

As part of this series, we are excited to welcome directors and producers, Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman for the screening and after-film discussion of their recent film “Between Two Worlds” on Tuesday, February 28 at 7:00 pm in ATLAS 100 on the CU Boulder Campus.

Who speaks for a divided community at the crossroads? “Between Two Worlds” is a groundbreaking personal exploration of the community and family divisions that are redefining American Jewish identity and politics. The filmmakers’ own families are battlegrounds over loyalty to Israel, interpretations of the Holocaust, intermarriage, and a secret communist past. Filmed in the United States and Israel, this first person documentary begins with a near riot at the Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco, reveals the agonizing battle over divestment from Israel on a university campus, and shows the crackdown on dissent in Israel itself.

Castro Theater Protesters at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Using five unique stories, this film goes beyond the superficial to reveal the passionate debates over identity and generational change that are taking place within today’s American Jewish community. Powerful and divergent feelings about Israel, issues involving ethnic and religious continuity, and the growth of the neo-conservative movement are just some of the provocative issues being addressed. Once seen as a voting block, American Jews no longer seem to be speaking in a singular voice. Clearly intended to spark dialogue, “Between Two Worlds” has already sparked a stimulating dialogue about today’s American Jewish community.

Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow

Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman are award-winning documentary filmmakers whose films include “Blacks and Jews,” “Secrets of Silicon Valley,” and “Thirst.” Kaufman founded and was the director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the first and largest independent Jewish film showcase in the world. Their work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Jerusalem International Film Festival, and aired on public television’s acclaimed “P.O.V.” and “Independent Lens” series. Their films have been used by activists and opinion leaders around the world and have been translated into over fifteen languages and broadcast internationally. The New Yorker magazine has said “Snitow and Kaufman bring a fair-minded skepticism to everything they film.”

This film is free and open to the public but as seating is limited, RSVPs are required.  Please email Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call CU’s Program in Jewish Studies at 303.492.7143.

CU’s  Week of Jewish Culture continues through Thursday, March 8.  The series kicks off Monday, February 27 at 7:00 PM with the world premier of the Ginzburg Geography with artist Jewlia Eisenberg. This interactive video project and art installation traces the life and work of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg whose journeys of love, resistance, exile, liberation, life and death during WWII and the Holocaust provide the back drop for others to “map” their life journeys. A complete list of programs and details can be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu or by calling 303.492.7143. The series concludes on March 8 with Purim concerts by the “nerdy, sexy, commie, girly” performances of Charming Hostess.

CU’s Week of Jewish Culture is an annual series produced and presented by the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder and generously supported by the Program’s donors. This year’s series is also supported by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support of the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by the Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

This year’s events feature artist-in-residence Jewlia Eisenberg and the world premier of the Ginzburg Geography Project. Maps, especially in the era of smart phones, play an increasingly significant role in our lives. They tell us where things are, how far they are and how to get from one point to another. Now imagine your life as a map, where you fell in love, where your heart was broken, where members of your family were born and where they died laid upon the life maps of thousands of others. This is the essence of the Ginzburg Geography.

Described as radical cartography, this project is an online video project and art installation that traces the life and work of Leone and Natalia Ginzburg. Leone was an Italian editor, journalist and teacher, as well as an important anti-fascist political activist, co-founding the anti-fascist action party, Justice and Liberty. His wife, Natalia, was an award-winning Italian author whose work explores family relationships, and politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. The Ginzburg Geography has as its foundation an interactive digital map of the family’s experience of love, family, resistance, escape, liberation and redemption in occupied Europe during WWII.

The interactive component invites others to work with Jewlia Eisenberg and map their own journeys of love, resistance, exile, liberation, life and death. These stories and maps will be woven into those of the Ginzburgs and be displayed in a final art installation on Wednesday, March 7 at 7 PM in the Black Box Theater of the CU ATLAS building.

Join us on Monday, February 27 at 7 PM for Mapping Love, Resistance, Exile and Liberation as Jewlia Eisenberg explains the lives of the Ginzburgs and invites you to be a part of the world premier of the Ginzburg Geography Project.

Jewlia Eisenberg will be serving as an artist-in-residence and will be available to work with groups who would be interested in mapping their life stories from February 27 through March 6. If you are interested in scheduling a group for this purpose, please contact Jamie Polliard at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu or via phone at 303.492.7143.

Charming Hostess with Jewlia Eisenberg Perform Thursday, March 8 at CU

Eisenberg is an artist, composer and founding performer for the band Charming Hostess She coined the term “Nerdy-Sexy-Commie-Girly” to describe her genre of music that spans an eclectic range of styles. Originally from New York City, she became an integral member of the San Francisco Bay Area and the New York Downtown music scenes in the 1990s.

Her music is both physical, using voices, vocal percussion, handclaps, heartbeats, sex-breath and silence and intellectual, exploring such topics as Bosnian genocide in Sarajevo Blues (2004) and the political/erotic nexus of Walter Benjamin and his Marxist muse in Trilectic (2002). Both of these works were released on John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Series on Tzadik.

She has been commissioned by the Sloan Foundation and the Goethe Institute SF and has received numerous awards, including: Trust for Mutual Understanding grant for collaboration with poets in ex-Yugoslavia, the Puffin Foundation grant for her Red Rosa project, a Katzenstein Fellow for collaboration with experimental architects and engineers as an Artist-In-Residence at MIT, a Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Grant for The Grim Arithmetic of Water, with aerial dance choreographer Jo Kreiter, a Goldman Fund Tikea Fellow for project-based radical film and music work with youth, and a Weisz Fellow for field research and recording among Jewish women in the Gondar region of Ethiopia. Additional information on Eisenberg and Charming Hostess can be found at charminghostess.us.

The week concludes with Charming Hostess in Concert on Thursday, March 8 at 7:30 and 9PM. This performance is inspired by the life and work of the Italian anti-fascists Natalia and Leone Ginzburg. Exploring their journeys of love, resistance, exile, and liberation through the mediums of music and radical cartography, The Ginzburg Geography features new music composed and performed by Charming Hostess and developed from the writings of the Ginzburgs as well as from the Italian regional traditions of Turin, Abruzzo and Rome, places central to their lives. This performance will include music from Italian Jewish liturgy, the oldest and most remote in Europe, as well as Italian anti-fascist songs, and work chants to resistance anthems. Tickets are $5 for students, $10 for general public or $15 at the door. Tickets can be purchase on-line at jewishstudies.colorado.edu. These concerts will be held in the intimate Black Box Theater of the ATLAS building on the CU Boulder campus. Space is limited so we encourage tickets to be secured early.

CU’s Week of Jewish Culture is an annual series produced and presented by the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder and generously supported by the Program’s donors. “As we have every year, CU’s Program in Jewish Studies is proud to be highlighting the most cutting edge forms of Jewish culture with an examination of Italian Jewish culture, an area not widely known or discussed,” said David Shneer, director of the Program in Jewish Studies at CU-Boulder. This year’s series is supported by the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support of the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by the Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

Events will take place in venues on the CU-Boulder campus as well as the CSU Fort Collins campus. Complete details for additional events from February 28 through March 7 can be found at jewishstudies.colorado.edu and in additional articles next week in Boulder Jewish News. Many events have limited seating so RSVP’s are suggested. For additional questions, contact the Program in Jewish Studies at 303.492.7143 or via email at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu.

The Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder provides an interdisciplinary curriculum for students who wish to learn more about Jewish culture, history, society, and religion. Under the guidance of a distinguished faculty, the program offers a wide range of courses on the Jewish experience in the global arena. For more information, visit jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

CU’s 2012 Holocaust Awareness Week will also adopt the UN’s theme this year which will focus on the “Children and the Holocaust.” Some children managed to survive in hiding, others fled to safe havens before it was too late, while many others suffered medical experiments or were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arriving at the death camps. Highlighting the impact of mass violence on children, this theme has important implications for the 21st century. CU’s keynote lecture, “Hidden Children of the Holocaust” on Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 pm in the University Memorial Center room 235 features University of California Davis professor and author Diane Wolf.

Anne Frank has largely shaped the image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis, yet her experience was not the norm. Wolf’s keynote lecture is based on her book “Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland” in which she draws on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Wolf analyzes the experiences of these Holocaust survivors, which were diametrically opposed to those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, especially if parents survived, leading many of those interviewed to remark, “My war began after the war.”

Diane Wolf, professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis

Diane Wolf is professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has authored “Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland,” “From Auschwitz to Ithaca: The Transnational Journey of Jake Geldwert” and “Factory Daughters“. She edited “Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork” and co-edited “Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas“. Her current research focuses on American cultural memory of the Holocaust, children of Holocaust survivors, and comparing the religious practices of secular Jews in both Israel and the U.S.

CU’s 28th Annual Holocaust Awareness Week includes film screenings, presentations  and testimonies from survivors. The schedule of events begins Tuesday, January 24:

Tuesday, January 24 at 7:00 pm
Film screening of “Mephisto”
Boulder JCC, 3800 Kalmia Avenue
$10 at the door**
This Oscar-winning political drama is based on Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel of the same name. In early 1930s Germany, ambitious actor Hendrik Hofgen cares little for politics and lives only for his art. But when the Nazis rise to power, Hofgen seizes the opportunity to perform propaganda plays for the Reich, gaining popularity and fame. But can he survive in a world where the ideology of evil is the ultimate drama?
**Presented by Menorah: Arts, Culture and Education at the Boulder Jewish Community Center. Visit www.boulderjcc.org for details.

The House on August Street by Aylelet Bargur

Wednesday, January 25 at 7:00 pm
“The House on August Street” with post-film discussion by Diane Wolf, professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis
University of Colorado Boulder, Atlas Building Room 100
**Free and open to the public, RSVPs are required as space is limited, email Nicholas.Underwood@colorado.edu or call 303.492.7143
From award-winning director Aylelet Bargur, “The House on August Street” tells the remarkable, unknown story of Beate Berger, a German Jew who single-handedly and with great resolve and vision rescued over 100 children during the Holocaust, smuggling them from Berlin to Palestine in the 1930s. Berger, founder of the House of Love Children’s Home (Beith Ahawah Kinderheim), Berlin’s first home for poor Jewish children, was quick to recognize the Nazi threat and resolved to protect the 120 children under her care. Raising the funds and making all the clandestine arrangements, Berger brought groups of children into Palestine from Germany from 1934 to 1939. The Beit Ahava orphanage in Haifa remains open today.

Thursday, January 26 at 7:00 pm
Keynote lecture “Hidden Children of the Holocaust” with Diane Wolf, author and professor of Sociology and director of Jewish Studies at UC Davis
University of Colorado Boulder, University Memorial Center room 235
Anne Frank largely shaped the image of the Jewish child hiding from the Nazis, yet her experience was not the norm. Drawing on interviews with seventy Jewish men and women who, as children, were placed in non-Jewish families during the Nazi occupation of Holland, Wolf analyzes the experiences of these Holocaust survivors which were diametrically opposed to the those who suffered in concentration camps. Although the war years were tolerable for most of these children, it was the end of the war that marked the beginning of a traumatic time, especially if parents survived, leading many of those interviewed here to remark, “My war began after the war.”

Friday, January 27 at 10:30 am and 1:30 pm
Reading of the names and survivor testimonies
University of Colorado Boulder
University Memorial Center room 235
CU’s Holocaust Awareness Week concludes with the reading of Holocaust victims’ names called the Litany of the Martyrs which will begin at 10:00 am in the UMC. Testimonies from local Holocaust survivors will be at 10:30 am and 1:30 pm.

A complete schedule of events can be found at www.hillelcolorado.org and http://jewishstudies.colorado.edu.

Holocaust Awareness Week is presented by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Hillel and co-sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies at CU, Menorah: Arts, Culture and Education at the Boulder JCC, the Cultural Events Board at CU, and Movers: Art and Conscience community collaborative series.

Diane Wolf’s visit has been made possible by generous donors to CU’s Hillel, the Program in Jewish Studies and the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project, directed by the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Support for the Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project is generously provided by Legacy Heritage Fund Limited.

Her talk, “The Black Book: Exile and Activism in 1940s Mexico City,” is part of Movers: Art and Conscience and Menorah’s exploration of persecuted artists in exile.

Merfish will offer a look at the site of the most extensive discussions of the Jewish Question in the history of German Communism: Mexico City circa 1943, where a group of German-speaking leftist intellectuals engaged in anti-Fascist activism in exile. There they collaborated with local artist group the “People’s Graphic Workshop” and formed “The Free Book,” the most important leftist exile press of the period.

Merfish’s work centers on the World War II activities of the Taller de Grafica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop, or TGP), founded in Mexico City in 1937, and the interactions of its members with a group of German-speaking leftist intellectuals who fled Fascist Europe for Mexico City.  The most famous of those intellectuals are Hannes Meyer, who had been the director of the Bauhaus, and Anna Seghers, the German-Jewish novelist who published the first account of the camps in her novel “The Seventh Cross,” which was a best-seller in the US and in Mexico.

In her talk she’ll focus on the book “Libro negro del terror nazi in europa” (The Black Book of Nazi Terror in Europe) published as a collaboration between this network of leftist German intellectuals and the TGP. Within the scope of one lecture, the book can be used as a window into these communities and the questions they faced in exile. One image in the book, Leopoldo Mendez’s “Deportation to Death,” has been described as the first Holocaust image to be created outside of Europe.

An elder of the village, Vysni Apsa, ca. 1945-38 ©Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy of International Center of Photography

The Movers: Art and Conscience collaborative together with Congregation Har HaShem, the Mizel Museum and the Program in Jewish Studies at CU Boulder are excited to offer an evening with Maya Benton, the director of the Roman Vishniac archive and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York on Thursday, December 1 at 7:30 PM at Congregation Har HaShem located at 3950 Baseline Road, Boulder.

Roman Vishniac was a Russian-American photographer and biologist who was best known for his dramatic photographs of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. His photographs shape our memory of that vanished world, yet only a small selection of his images – a very small fraction of his life’s work – has ever been printed or published. The recent donation of Vishniac’s entire estate to the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York includes tens of thousands of negatives, contact sheets, prints and a lifetime of personal correspondence and ephemera.

Curator Maya Benton will be discussing the process of establishing the Vishniac archive at ICP, and will present recently discovered work, including never-before-seen moving film footage, images of Zionist agrarian training camps in Holland before World War II and Displaced Persons camps in Berlin following the War, photographs made in America in the 1940s documenting the work of Jewish social service organizations, as well as a large selection of contact sheets, negatives, and never-before-seen work from Central and Eastern Europe.  She will also discuss the influence of

European modernism and avant-garde movements on his most accomplished work. Benton will also address new research focusing on the commission of Vishniac’s photographs by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), repositioning Vishniac within the broader context of commissioned social documentary photography in the 1930s, and revealing a profoundly versatile artist who belongs firmly in the canon of the great photographers of the 20th century.

Featured in a New York Times profile, Maya Benton is director of the Roman Vishniac archive and adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP).  An A.B.D. at Courtauld Institute of Art, her research focuses on documentary photographs of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe, Israeli contemporary photography and video art, and more broadly, Jewish visual culture and vernacular photography.

Benton has recently curated exhibitions on the work of photojournalist Ruth Gruber, a series on contemporary Israeli video art, and is currently establishing a major public archive of Roman Vishniac’s work at ICP, in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.  This work will culminate in a traveling retrospective and catalog on Vishniac, set to open at ICP in 2013. The archive and exhibition have recently been awarded a lead National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant.  A slide show of Vishniac’s photography is available online.

Additional images from the Vishniac archive are available for publication in association with the promotion of this event.  Please contact Jamie Polliard at Jamie.Polliard@colorado.edu or via phone at 303.492.7143 for more information.