book

May 12, 2025

THE ART SPY. The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
Book talk by Michelle Young, New York and Paris

2025-05-12T07:19:41-04:00May 12th, 2025|, |Comments Off on THE ART SPY. The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
Book talk by Michelle Young, New York and Paris

In this book talk, author Michelle Young will present WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland (1898–1980), an unlikely heroine who infiltrated the Nazi leadership in Paris during World War II to save the world’s most treasured artworks. Rose Vallant was a curator at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris when the Nazis invaded France, occupied the museum, and began using it as a sorting center for thousands of pieces of stolen art from across Europe. Valland made herself appear as nonthreatening and essential as possible, retaining her position in the museum for years while keeping meticulous secret records of the provenance and destination of every piece of art. Her gathered intelligence enabled the recovery of hundreds of thousands of [...]

Apr 29, 2025

2024 – Jutta Götzmann and Rachel Stern (Eds.)
Liebe und Verrat. Der Expressionist Fritz Ascher aus New Yorker Privatsammlungen

2025-04-29T13:05:45-04:00April 29th, 2025|Selected Publications|Comments Off on 2024 – Jutta Götzmann and Rachel Stern (Eds.)
Liebe und Verrat. Der Expressionist Fritz Ascher aus New Yorker Privatsammlungen

Der spätexpressionistische Künstler Fritz Ascher (1893–1970), von dem sich heute wichtige Werkbestände in New Yorker Privatsammlungen befinden, überlebte zwei Weltkriege und die Verfolgung durch die Nationalsozialisten. Gemeinsam mit der Fritz Ascher Society für verfolgte, verfemte und verbotene Kunst, New York, präsentiert das Augustinermuseum in Freiburg erstmals sein Frühwerk in einer konzentrierten Auswahl graphischer Arbeiten. Mythologische und literarische, historische und biblische Themen zeigen die Spannbreite von Aschers Interessen. Stets ist er ein genauer Beobachter seiner Zeit. Seit 1916 befasst er sich in intimen Zeichnungen mit den Themen Liebe und Verrat. Die Urkatastrophe des Ersten Weltkrieges und die revolutionären Unruhen in Berlin führen ihn zu christlich-spirituellen Inhalten, die er radikal neu interpretiert. Ascher kreiert mit seiner einzigartigen künstlerischen Stimme expressive Werke [...]

Apr 28, 2025

DEAR MISS PERKINS.
A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
Book talk by Rebecca Brenner Graham, Ph.D.

2025-04-29T04:08:48-04:00April 28th, 2025|, |Comments Off on DEAR MISS PERKINS.
A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany
Book talk by Rebecca Brenner Graham, Ph.D.

Perkins’s early experiences working in Chicago’s famed Hull House, and as a firsthand witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire, shaped her determination to advocate for immigrants and refugees. As Secretary of Labor, she wrestled with widespread antisemitism and isolationism, finding creative ways to work around quotas and restrictive immigration laws. Diligent, resilient, empathetic, yet steadfast, she persisted on behalf of the desperate when others refused to act. Book talk by Rebecca Brenner Graham, Ph.D. Image above: Frances Perkins at her desk, 1938. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, College Park REGISTER FOR ONLINE EVENT Frances Perkins, age four. Courtesy Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special [...]

Jan 26, 2025

Signs and Wonders. Author Melvin Jules Bukiet in Conversation with Artist David Stern

2025-02-13T07:00:51-05:00January 26th, 2025|, , |Comments Off on Signs and Wonders. Author Melvin Jules Bukiet in Conversation with Artist David Stern

This presentation starts with Bukiet reading an excerpt from a novel he is currently working on, followed by an inspiring discussion with Stern about the daily reality and nature of being a writer. They continue with a broader conversation about the arts and their relationship to reality. As they delve into his books, they explore the direct or indirect presence of the Holocaust in his works and the way it still shakes the foundation of our civilization. Melvin Jules Bukiet has published eleven books, including After, Signs and Wonders and Strange Fire. His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and other magazines, his non-fiction in the American Scholar and other magazines. He [...]

Feb 26, 2024

Traces of a Jewish Artist:
The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (1888–1942)
A Book Talk by Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

2024-03-07T07:17:49-05:00February 26th, 2024|, , |Comments Off on Traces of a Jewish Artist:
The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (1888–1942)
A Book Talk by Kerry Wallach, Gettysburg College

In this presentation, Gettysburg College professor and author Kerry Wallach explores the life and work of Rahel Szalit (1888–1942; also: Szalit-Marcus). Szalit was a sought-after illustrator and painter who was active in 1920s Berlin and 1930s Paris. Image above: Rahel Szalit-Marcus, The Drive to the Rabbi, in Milgroym, 1922. Lithograph. Rahel Szalit was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. She painted and drew landscapes, Berlin city scenes, animals, and portraits of women, children, and public figures. She produced numerous lithographs and worked in pen and ink, pencil, pastel, chalk, oil paint, and watercolors. Women figured prominently in many scenes, from small-town Jewish life to snapshots of the metropolis. [...]

Jan 16, 2024

In Hitler’s Munich:
Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism
A Book Talk by Michael Brenner, Munich and Washington D.C.

2024-01-31T18:36:36-05:00January 16th, 2024|, , |Comments Off on In Hitler’s Munich:
Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism
A Book Talk by Michael Brenner, Munich and Washington D.C.

In the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I and the failed November Revolution of 1918–19, which was led by many prominent Jewish politicians, the conservative government of Bavaria identified Jews with left-wing radicalism. Munich became a hotbed of right-wing extremism, with synagogues under attack and Jews physically assaulted in the streets. It was here that Adolf Hitler established the Nazi movement and developed his antisemitic ideas. This lecture provides a gripping account of how Bavaria's capital city became the testing ground for Nazism and the Final Solution. Michael Brenner holds the chair of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He is also Distinguished Professor of History and Seymour and [...]

Dec 26, 2023

The New Man as Man Machine
A Book Talk by Eckhart Gillen, Berlin

2024-01-24T15:36:23-05:00December 26th, 2023|, , |Comments Off on The New Man as Man Machine
A Book Talk by Eckhart Gillen, Berlin

Fifteen years after the great financial crisis of 2008, which shook the capitalist economic system in America and Europe to its foundations, the book “The New Man as Man Machine” presents, for the first time, the interrelationship of art and political economy in the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America during the interwar period. By taking a look back at the 1920s and 1930s, it attempts to better understand our own era and its well-founded fears with regard to globalization and a new global economic crisis. Image above: Kliment Redko, Aufstand, 1924-25 This project focuses on how artists reacted to the central questions of the political economy in these three [...]

Jun 9, 2022

Nazi Billionaires.
The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
Author David de Jong and Rachel Stern in conversation

2022-07-20T13:29:12-04:00June 9th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Nazi Billionaires.
The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
Author David de Jong and Rachel Stern in conversation

This event features a conversation between Rachel Stern and David de Jong, author of the landmark work of investigative journalism, which reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich – and how America knowingly allowed these horrors to happen. In 1946, Günther Quandt – patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW – was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his archrival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have [...]

Jun 7, 2022

Death and Immortality:
The Gentle Power of Hans von Trotha’s “Pollak’s Arm”
Hans von Trotha and Ori Z Soltes in conversation

2022-08-25T13:01:20-04:00June 7th, 2022|, , |Comments Off on Death and Immortality:
The Gentle Power of Hans von Trotha’s “Pollak’s Arm”
Hans von Trotha and Ori Z Soltes in conversation

Ludwig Pollak (Prague 1868-1943 Auschwitz) was an extraordinary connoisseur of antiquities--an Austro-Hungarian Jew whose path into academia was impeded by his religion, but who settled in Rome, where he carved out a unique place for himself as an expert in recognizing, understanding, and organizing great works of art. It was he who shaped and articulated the magnificent collections of JP Morgan. Of perhaps even greater consequence, his astute eye saw a sculpted fragment of an arm in a flea market that, he deduced, was the limb missing from the spectacular Hellenistic-Roman sculptural group known as Laocoon. He gifted that arm fragment to the Vatican so that it might complete the work that occupied an important place within [...]