Survival and Intimations of Immortality:
Artist and Curator Talk

Kitra Cahana is an acclaimed documentary photographer, filmmaker, and TED speaker. She holds a B.A. in philosophy from McGill University and an M.A. in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her work explores important social, anthropological, and spiritual themes, and she is committed to telling deeply human stories with sensitivity and depth. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ProPublica, The Intercept etc.

Kitra has received numerous recognitions, including, a Peabody Award, a TED Senior Fellowship, a DuPont Columbia award, a World Press Photo award, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for young photographers, a World Press Photo Online Video of the Year Nominee, multiple Canada Council grants for the Visual Arts, and a year long residency at FABRICA.

Rabbi Ronnie Cahana is a rabbi and poet who had a severe brain-stem stroke in 2011 that left him quadriplegic in a rare condition called locked-in syndrome; paralyzed from the eyes down with a fully cognizant mind. Today, Rabbi Cahana has regained his capacity to speak, breathe, and sing. He works with a scribe who helps him produce his poetry, psalms, and Divrei Torah.

Ori Z Soltes, PhD teaches at Georgetown University across the disciplines of theology, art history, philosophy and politics. Since 1997 he is a Founding Director of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP) and has spent more than 20 years researching and consulting on the issue of Nazi-plundered art. A former Director of the B’nai B’rit Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington DC, he has extensive experience in developing and executing exhibition concepts. He is the author or editor of 25 books, including The Ashen Rainbow: The Holocaust and the Arts; Symbols of Faith: How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; and Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish Art and Architecture.

Rachel Stern is the founding director of the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York. She emigrated to the USA in 1994, wrote for AUFBAU and worked for ten years in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has independently organized numerous art exhibitions, and has written extensively about art. Most recently, she co-edited with Jutta Götzmann the exhibition catalogue Love and Betrayal: The Expressionist Fritz Ascher from New York Private Collections (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Publishers 2024). Stern studied art history and economics at the Georg August University of Göttingen.

This program is co-sponsored by the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and the Fritz Ascher Society and presented as part of Survival and Intimations of Immortality: The Art of Alice Lok Cahana, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana, which is on view until May 25, 2025.