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2006 Programs
Spring 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Lecture and Book Signing
Jeffrey M. Peck: Being Jewish in the New Germany
(Rutgers University Press, 2005)
Jeffrey M. Peck is a professor in communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in residence at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His focus has been on interdisciplinary cultural issues, especially questions of national and minority identities and German-Jewish life since reunification.
Professor Peck looks at the rebirth of a Jewish community in a country where such a development could hardly have been expected, and argues that there is, indeed, a significant social, political and professional future for Jews in the new Germany.
Germany boasts the fastest growing Jewish population in Europe today. The streets of Berlin show signs of a significant revival of Jewish culture, but it is very different from, some would say almost unrelated to, the German Jewish culture that was decimated by the Nazis. Nonetheless, Jewish immigration from Russia, changes in immigration and naturalization laws, and generous welfare benefits have resulted in a permanent Jewish community.
Professor Peck believes it is important to consider how Jews live in Germany today rather than ask why they would choose to do so in the light of 20th century history.
R.S.V.P.: Mrs. Kirschen at: 212-744-6400
Members: $5.00; non-members: $10.00
Wednesday, February 22, 2006, 7pm
Lecture
Dr. Lawrence Suid:
The Image of the Holocaust and Germany in Hollywood Movies
Dr. Lawrence Suid is a military historian whose academic credentials also make him an exceptional film critic, especially when it comes to evaluating images of Germany in movies made in Hollywood in the 1940s. He is the author of Guts and Glory: The making of the American Military Image in Film (University Press of Kentucky: 2002).
In Dr. Suid’s research and analyses, U.S. Department of Defense personnel become part of the planning and production processes of war films. The insights rendered by Dr. Suid’s unique methodology include oral interviews with many of those involved in filmmaking.
Among other things, Dr. Suid suggests that the U.S. War Department was interested in resurrecting the image of Germans even while World War II was still in progress. With some awareness that in the postwar world the United States would be more closely allied with Germany than with Russia, it was in our interest to begin to change perceptions
R.S.V.P.: Mrs. Kirschen at: 212-744-6400
Sunday, March 12, 2006, 2-4pm
Stage Reading
in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York and the Jewish Theatre of Austria
The Judenstadt – A Stage of Mind
by Warren Rosenzweig
Inspired by the contemporary European Jewish experience and the author’s personal confrontation with questions of cultural-ethnic identity in Vienna, Warren Rosenzweig began his research for The Judenstadt in late 2001. The first draft of the play was completed and performed in 2004 at the Vienna Volkstheater, in commemoration of Theodor Herzl. A second reading was given at the Municipal Theater of Haifa, Israel, in the English original.
The Leo Baeck Institute is proud to be the venue for the first American presentation of this provocative soul-searching drama that resonates back to the themes of Herzl’s original classic Der Judenstadt.
Selections from the play will be performed, script-in-hand, by participating actors with the author, who will direct the performance. A reception will follow.
Members: $5.00; non-members: $10.00
R.S.V.P.: CJH Box Office 917-606-8200 (boxoffice@cjh.org)
Sunday, March 12, 2006, 6-8pm
The Leo Baeck Institute is proud to be the venue for the first American presentation of this provocative soul-searching drama that resonates back to the themes of Herzl’s original classic Der Judenstadt.
Film screening in cooperation with Yeshiva University Museum
We Want the Light
This award winning film looks at the high level of integration of the Jews into German cultural life in the latter part of the 19th century and the first 33 years of the 20th; the roles played by Moses and Felix Mendelssohn and the importance of music in the dream of unproblematic assimilation of the Jews into German society. The Gurzenich Orchestra, The Cologne Opera Chorus, and The Cologne Cathedral Children’s Choir are conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy.
R.S.V.P.: CJH Box Office 917-606-8200 (boxoffice@cjh.org)
Monday, March 20, 2006, 7pm
Lecture
Monica Strauss:
Maria Altmann’s Case: Klimt and the Austrian-Jewish Cultural Heritage
Monica Strauss is an art historian currently writing a biography of Gustav Klimt with special emphasis on the Jewish patrons who played crucial roles in his career. Among those patrons were Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Adele, the only woman Klimt portrayed twice, died in 1925 but her husband was forced into exile in 1938 and his art collection was confiscated by the Nazis. After the war, the six Klimts owned by Bloch-Bauers ended up in the Belvedere Museum in Vienna despite the stipulation in Ferdinand's 1945 Will that all his Austrian property be returned to his nieces and nephews.
After seven years of adjudication, a breakthrough decision was reached by an Austrian arbitration committee on January 16, 2006. Their conclusion was that the paintings by Gustav Klimt in Vienna's Belvedere Museum that were once owned by Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer should be returned to their niece Maria Altmann, now a 90-year-old American citizen living in Los Angeles. The decision made headlines around the world.
Monica Strauss' in-depth familiarity with the background of the case and the major players enable her to present this rich saga with details never before made public.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006, 2pm-4pm
Herbert A. Strauss Memorial Seminar
Herbert A. Strauss, the eminent historian of German-Jewish migration during the Nazi period, Professor at the Julliard School and later Professor and NAACP advisor at City College of New York, founding director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Technical University Berlin and the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration New York, passed away on March 11, 2005 in New York. On the occasion of the anniversary of his death and to announce the establishment of the Herbert and Lotte Strauss Collection at the LBI archives New York, a seminar will be held. The seminar will commemorate a scholar whose personal and professional life was shaped by the experience of the destruction of Jewish life in Europe and by the “conviction that survival confers an obligation.” It will include topics to which Professor Strauss devoted his career: anti-Semitism, acculturation, emigration and immigration. Former students, colleagues and friends will address different aspects of Herbert A.Strauss’ life and work.
SPEAKERS:
Moderator:
Marion Kaplan, Professor of Jewish History, New York University
Greetings:
Carol Kahn Strauss, Executive Director, Leo Baeck Institute
PARTICIPANTS:
- Werner Bergmann, Professor at the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technische Universität Berlin
- Christhard Hoffmann, Professor of Modern European History, University of Bergen/Norway
- Louise Forsyth, Chair, History Department, Poly Prep Country Day School, New York
- Ursula Gehring-Münzel, Author “Vom Schutzjuden zum Staatsbürger: die gesellschaftliche Integration der Würzburger Juden, 1803-1871”
- Niels Hansen, Former German Ambassador to Israel, 1981-1985
- Alfons Soellner, Professor of Political Theory, Technische Universität Chemnitz
- Fritz Weinschenk, President American Federation of Jews from Central Europe
- Frank Mecklenburg, Director of Research and Chief Archivist, LBI New York
The seminar will be followed by a reception. For those interested, at 5 p.m. there will be a presentation of the hour-long film “We were German Jews” (director: Michael Blackwood, 1981).
R.S.V.P.: Mrs. Kirschen at: 212-744-6400
The event is co-sponsored by Leo Baeck Institute, New York; American Federation of Jews from Central Europe; Jewish Philanthropic Fund of 1933. We also wish to acknowledge the generosity of Mrs. Lotte Strauss in supporting this event.
Sunday, April 2, 2006, 2pm
Film screening
We Were So Beloved
(145 minutes, 1985)
Between 1933 and 1941 thousands of Jews fled Nazi Germany and Austria for America. Leaving behind brothers, sisters and parents, more than 20,000 of them made new lives in a small residential area of New York City called Washington Heights. The new emigrants soon created a neighborhood filled with the services and shops and Konditorei that reminded them of home.
We Were So Beloved uses gripping personal testimony to examine the complex emotional implications of the survival of the Jews of Washington Heights, as well as the joys of being together in a new community.
The area of upper Manhattan known as Washington Heights was referred to as “Frankfurt on the Hudson” by historian Steven Lowenstein because it became the new home for so many German-speaking Jewish refugees from Central Europe. Between 1938 and 1945 this community attracted thousands of newly arrived émigrés who still could not believe their fate, because in the old country “we were so beloved”.
Mr. Kirchheimer will introduce the film and answer questions. He will speak about his own extraordinary experience in making this film more than twenty years ago, and the incredible resonance it continues to have after all these years.
R.S.V.P.: Box Office at: 917-606-8200
Members: $5.00; non-members: $10.00
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 7-9pm
Lecture and Book Signing
Jeffrey Herf
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust
In this hauntingly original new book, Author Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, has converted the classic analysis of Nazi propaganda as aimed against the Jews to see it as a campaign to alert German citizens to the dangers of extinction by a vast international conspiracy. In his delusionary world view, A. Hitler portrayed the Holocaust as a defensive act, necessary to destroy Jews before Jews destroyed Germany.
The Jewish Enemy is the first extensive study of how Hitler used anti-Semitism to legitimize war and genocide to his own people in order to combat an omnipotent Jewish foe, capable of manipulating the actions of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are still part of the global landscape. Jeffrey Herf revisits the dangers of such paranoia by taking a look at the ideology of the Third Reich.
Members: $5.00; non-members: $10.00
R.S.V.P.: Mrs. Kirschen at: 212-744-6400
Tuesday, June 6, 5-7pm
Exhibition Opening
On the Wings of a Song
Exhibition of art and archival documents from the Leo Baeck Institute Collections highlighting Jewish involvement in music
From its own archives and art collection, the Leo Baeck Institute has put together an exhibit to showcase the countless musicians, composers and patrons who enriched European cultural life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Many were Jewish, while others, like Mozart, received early and important support in the salons of cosmopolitan Jewish women such as Fanny von Arnstein and her sister Cäcilie Eskeles. Mozart lived in the von Arnstein residence in Vienna for an extended period of time and composed some of his most inspired works there, including The Abduction from the Seraglio and the Haffner Symphony. Beethoven dedicated one of his songs to Cäcilie Eskeles in gratitude for her patronage.
Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Klemperer and other great names in our Western musical heritage are also well represented in this special showing of rarely seen treasures from the Leo Baeck Institute.
Film Series
Sunday, July 9, 2pm
Sophie Scholl - The Final Days
Director Marc Rothemund / Germany 2005 / 117 min (German with English subtitles)
Munich, 1943: Sophie and Hans Scholl are members of the Weiße Rose (White Rose), a resistance group against the Nazi regime. When the siblings lay out fliers at the university, they are caught by the caretaker who calls the Gestapo. After their imprisonment, they are interrogated for days. On February 22, the Scholls and their aide Christoph Probst are accused of high treason and sentenced to death.
Monday, July 10, 6pm
The Goebbels Experiment
Director Lutz Hachmeister / Germany & UK 2004 / 108 mins (German with English subtitles)
The Nazi propaganda mastermind behind Hitler speaks in first person as actor Kenneth Branagh reads pages of the diary kept by the chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, revealing the man’s most inner thoughts. German archives trace the life of the second most powerful man of the Third Reich, detailing his initial attraction to the Nazi party and his adoration of Hitler.
Tuesday, July 11, 6pm
From Swastika to Jim Crow
Director Lori Cheatle and Martin D. Toub / USA 2000 / 60 mins
Before and during the Second World War, Jewish intellectuals and scholars who escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the U.S. faced an uncertain future. Confronted with anti-Semitism at major universities and a public distrust of foreigners, a surprising number secured teaching positions at traditionally black colleges in the segregated South. In many cases they formed lasting relationships with their students and had an important impact on the communities in which they lived and worked.
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