Events

2026-03-25T00:00:00-04:00
  • Immortality, Memory, Creativity, and Survival:
    The Arts of Alice Lok Cahana,
    Ronnie Cahana, and Kitra Cahana
    Lecture by Ori Z Soltes, Washington DC

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT HERE. Lecture featuring Ori Z Soltes, Teaching Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC Moderated by Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York This lecture explores several interlocking themes. The work of three artists, each in a different medium—Alice was primarily a painter, Ronnie is a poet, and Kitra is a well-recognized photographer and filmmaker—will be presented and explored with regard to both aesthetic and conceptual intentions and outcomes. Since these three artists represent three generations from within one family, the question of how that familial relationship does or does not impinge on the artistic output will be explored. Inevitably, the fact that the first of the three was a [...]

    Free
  • Legacy And Creativity:
    The Filmmaking and Photography of Kitra Cahana
    In Conversation with Ori Z Soltes

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT HERE. Conversation featuring Kitra Cahana, Documentary Photographer, Videographer and Photo/Video Artist and Ori Z Soltes, Teaching Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC Introduced by Rachel Stern, Executive Director of The Fritz Ascher Society in New York NY Kitra Cahana's award winning work ranges from photographic studies of American Teens for National Geographic Magazine to documentaries on the annual life-saving dance competition in a small town in northern Canada. She is renowned for work that consistently reflects a deep sense of empathy with her subjects. Her grandmother was a teen-aged Holocaust survivor who became an intense and powerful painter. Her father, a rabbi and a poet, was severely disabled by a stroke at the [...]

    Free
  • White Shadows:
    The Photograms of Anneliese Hager (1904-1997)
    Lynette Roth, Harvard Art Museums

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    Lecture by Lynette Roth Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums Moderated by Rachel Stern Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Anneliese Hager (1904-1997) is one of a number of modern artists who began their artistic experimentation in Germany after National Socialist cultural policy began to harden against all forms of modern art. Her preferred medium was the photogram, a photographic image made by placing an object directly on (or in close proximity to) a light-sensitive surface and exposing it to light. Hager called the reversal of light and dark in the resulting contact print “white shadows.” [...]

    Free
  • Biala (1903-2000):
    The Rash Acts of Rescue and Escape
    Jason Andrew, New York

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT HERE. More information about Janice Biala is available HERE. Lecture featuring Jason Andrew Independent Scholar, Curator and Producer in New York Introduced by Rachel Stern Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York Biala (1903-2000) was a Polish born American painter whose career stretched over eight decades and spanned two continents. Through it all, she retained an intimacy in her art rooted in Old World Europe—sensibilities that began with memories of her childhood in a Polish village, shaped by School of Paris painters like Bonnard, Matisse and Braque, inspired by Velázquez and the Spanish Masters, and broadened by the community of loft-living artists in Post World War II Downtown New York. Her [...]

    Free
  • Live From
    Museum of Jewish Heritage
    Carolyn Enger’s
    Mischlinge Exposé

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage  — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the German Consulate General in New York, and the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized, and Banned Art for a stirring performance of Enger’s Mischlinge Exposé, Live from Edmond J. Safra Hall™. The performance will be followed by a discussion between Enger and Rachel Stern, Founding Director and CEO of the Fritz Ascher Society. Carolyn Enger is a pianist based in the greater New York City area, with roots reaching back to Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland. Her Mischlinge Exposé brings to light the stories of Mischlinge—a derogatory term used by the Nazis to describe people with both Jewish and Aryan ancestry—like her [...]

    Free
  • Between Art and Record Keeping –
    Artistic Representations of the Holocaust
    Ori Z Soltes, Washington DC

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT HERE. Visual art during and after the Holocaust, by victims and survivors eloquently contradicts the famous comment by Theodor Adorno that "after the Holocaust to make art is barbaric." On the contrary, it was and is necessary: as part of the record of events as they were transpiring, and as part of the human response to horror--to express anger, to raise questions, to offer healing--in the time after those events. Who creates the art and what kind of art is created? What role does it play in wrestling with the question of what God is and what we humans are? These issues have implications both from within the heart of the Holocaust and from well beyond its particular boundaries. [...]

    Free
  • Excluded and yet entangled in two dictatorships:
    The political constructivist Oskar Nerlinger
    Eckhart Gillen, Berlin

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    Oskar Nerlinger (1893-1969) was one of the most important artists of the committed art scene in the Weimar Republic. He was a member of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Art (ASSO for short), which was founded in 1928 and belonged to the KPD, which cooperated with the Soviet avant-garde artist group Oktober. At that time there was no conflict between positions of aesthetic modernism and KPD politics. In 1932 the political and artistic avant-garde in the Soviet Union fell apart, with serious consequences for left-wing artists in Germany. Almost at the same time, the Nazi system broke with all forms of modernity. With his idea of art suddenly doubly isolated within his own party, which followed Stalin's art verdict, [...]

    Free
  • Becoming Jewish:
    The Sculptor Benno Elkan (1877-1960)
    Christian Walda, Dortmund with
    Wolfgang Weick and Ori Z. Soltes

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    Born 1877 in Dortmund, the sculptor Benno Elkan (1877-1960) first studied painting in Munich and Karlsruhe. At the end of his studies, he turned to sculpture. As a young artist, he spent time in Paris, Rome, and Frankfurt. Elkan’s oeuvre was largely made up of commissions. In the beginning, he mainly created tombs. Medals, portrait busts of well-known personalities, monuments to victims and candelabras follow, partly for the religious (Jewish and Christian) context. Elkan fled persecution by the German Nazi regime to Great Britain in 1934and lived with his family in London until the end of his life. Perhaps the most important work besides the Menorah in Jerusalem (1956) was never built: Memorial to the Defenseless Victims of the Bombing [...]

    Free
  • Building the Largest Digital Memorial
    to the Victims of Nazism:
    The Arolsen Archives
    with Floriane Azoulay and Giora Zwilling, Arolsen

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    The International Tracing Service (ITS), since 2019 called Arolsen Archives, was established by the Allies in 1948 as a central search and information center. They house the world’s most extensive collection of documents about the victims of National Socialist persecution, including documents from Nazi concentration camps, ghettoes and penal institutions, documents about forced laborers, and documents from the early post-war period about Displaced Persons, mainly Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp prisoners, and forced laborers. People who had fled the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union for political reasons are also included. The archive's holdings consist of 30 million documents in total and belong to UNESCO’s Memory of the World. At this event, Floriane Azoulay (Director) and Giora Zwilling (Deputy [...]

    Free
  • Cartoon Crusader:
    Arthur Szyk’s War against Nazism
    Steven Luckert, Washington DC

    1014 - space for ideas 1014 5th Avenue, New York, New York, NY, United States

    During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Polish Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951) was best known for his richly detailed book illustrations and magnificent illuminations on Jewish themes. He portrayed the Jews as a heroic nation that had resisted oppression through the ages and eventually triumphed. His Jews were fighters for their own freedom and the freedom of others. Szyk sought to redefine how the Jews viewed themselves and how others viewed them. His works thus challenged the notion that Jewish history was merely one long saga of suffering and, at the same time, refuted the then common antisemitic canard that the Jews were a cowardly people. With the coming to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler [...]

    Free