Fritz Ascher Gesellschaft Archives - Fritz Ascher Society

Jan 18, 2026

Costume as Character:
Celebrating the Legacy of Ruth Morley
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York, NY

Rachel Stern2026-01-18T16:32:44-05:00January 18th, 2026|Events, Lectures|Comments Off on Costume as Character:
Celebrating the Legacy of Ruth Morley
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street, New York, NY

Costume designer Ruth Morley was behind the iconic looks of several characters now considered legendary in cinema history. A Kindertransport child refugee from Vienna, in the 1950s she studied under German-American painter Hans Hofmann and went on to design costumes for opera and ballet before moving into theater, film and television. Her work can be seen in such iconic films as The Hustler (1961), The Miracle Worker (1962, Academy Award nomination), Taxi Driver (1976), Annie Hall (1977), Kramer vs Kramer (1979), One from the Heart (1981), The Chosen (1981), Tootsie (1982, BAFTA nomination) and Ghost (1990). In the 1980’s she began teaching and mentoring costume design graduate students at Brandeis and NYU. REGISTER HERE Join panelists Deborah Nadoolman Landis (Costume Designer and Distinguished Professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, [...]

Jan 9, 2026

The Third Generation.
‘So are these the footsteps of my grandmother or my own?’
Presentation by Sabine Apostolo, Vienna (Austria)

Rachel Stern2026-01-09T06:16:32-05:00January 9th, 2026|Events, Lectures|Comments Off on The Third Generation.
‘So are these the footsteps of my grandmother or my own?’
Presentation by Sabine Apostolo, Vienna (Austria)

Curator Sabine Apostolo will give a virtual tour through the exhibition “The Third Generation. The Holocaust in Family Memory” that was shown at the Jewish Museum Vienna from September 2024 to March 2025 and just closed at the Jewish Museum Munich. Image above: Die Dritte Generation Titel, Zitat: Cécile Wajsbrot, Mémorial, Göttingen 2023, 87 © JMW / Drahtzieher Design & Kommunikation REGISTER HERE Eighty years after the Holocaust, the last eyewitnesses are dying. Their stories, but also their trauma, have been passed on to their children and grandchildren. While the Second Generation grew up as direct observers of their parents’ psychological and physical damage, the Third Generation can look with greater distance at the family histories, [...]

Dec 16, 2025

The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin, 1933-1942
Film Screening and Discussion with Director Stefan Roloff, Berlin (Germany)

Rachel Stern2025-12-16T11:14:45-05:00December 16th, 2025|Events, Lectures|Comments Off on The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin, 1933-1942
Film Screening and Discussion with Director Stefan Roloff, Berlin (Germany)

Join film director Stefan Roloff in conversation with Rachel Stern about the The Red Orchestra, a Berlin-based resistance group that fought against the Nazis from 1933 to 1942. A special focus will be artist Rainer Küchenmeister (1926-2010), who became a painter while incarcerated at the age of sixteen, inspired by a fellow female inmate and resister who was later beheaded. After the war his work was shown at documenta among other venues. Between January 21 and 29, you can view The Red Orchestra on your home device. A link will be provided to all who register: REGISTER HERE WATCH THE TRAILER: The Red Orchestra (2003) is a documentary by Stefan [...]

Dec 16, 2025

Under Il Duce’s Shadow:
Italian Art and Artists During the Fascist Regime
Presentation by Nicola Lucchi, PhD, New York (NY)

Rachel Stern2026-01-14T16:27:59-05:00December 16th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Under Il Duce’s Shadow:
Italian Art and Artists During the Fascist Regime
Presentation by Nicola Lucchi, PhD, New York (NY)

Italian artistic life under Mussolini was defined less by rigid prescriptions than by a continuous negotiation between competing aesthetic and political demands. Italy, the birthplace of Futurism, had long experimented with modernist innovation, and elements of that movement’s rhetoric and visual language found sympathetic audiences within the fascist state. At the same time, powerful factions within the regime promoted a return to classicism, academicism, and the revival of Italy’s artistic past. The government’s cultural policy therefore oscillated between these poles, attempting to reconcile—and ultimately absorb—contradictory artistic currents into the fascist body politic. Image above: Xanti Schawinsky, Sì , 1934. Artists responded in very different ways: some worked with the regime [...]

Nov 12, 2025

Looted! The Nazi Art Plunder of Jewish Families in France
Book talk by Peter Elliott (France)

Rachel Stern2025-12-12T14:56:12-05:00November 12th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Looted! The Nazi Art Plunder of Jewish Families in France
Book talk by Peter Elliott (France)

In this book talk Peter Elliott speaks about the lives and art collections of four French Jewish families, whose art was looted and whose businesses were confiscated during the Nazi Occupation of France (1940-44). He speaks about their businesses and art collections, and the journeys of their paintings during wartime and beyond. The four protagonist families all made an important cultural and economic contribution to France. Image above: Detail of book cover The four protagonist families all made an important cultural and economic contribution to France. The Bader/Heilbronn/Meyer family were founders of the French department store, Galeries Lafayette. Their entire art collections were looted by the German ERR (Reichsleiter Rosenberg [...]

Nov 4, 2025

Resistance and Art:
The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin
Presentation by Stefan Roloff, Berlin (Germany)
School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York, NY

Rachel Stern2025-12-17T15:26:16-05:00November 4th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Resistance and Art:
The “Red Orchestra” Anti-Nazi Group in Berlin
Presentation by Stefan Roloff, Berlin (Germany)
School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York, NY

BFA Visual and Critical Studies, the SVA Honors Program and the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art host a lecture by painter and filmmaker Stefan Roloff, exploring the visual art and resistance of three members of the "Red Orchestra" underground anti-Nazi group. Image above: Katja Meirowsky, Photo of cabaret performance at the jazz club “Die Badewanne” [“The Bathtub”] in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 1949/50. The so-called “Red Orchestra” fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942. The Gestapo labeled them as Communists and traitors, a theory that was upheld by Allied Secret Services until recently. Historians now officially recognize their work as that of the largest and most diverse civil anti-Nazi resistance [...]

Oct 23, 2025

Flight or Fight? Artists in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Presentation by Rachel Stern, New York
Kupferberg Holocaust Center @ Queensborough Community College, Queens, NY

Rachel Stern2025-12-09T06:49:04-05:00October 23rd, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Flight or Fight? Artists in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Presentation by Rachel Stern, New York
Kupferberg Holocaust Center @ Queensborough Community College, Queens, NY

Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialist regime controlled artistic work in Germany. Join Rachel Stern, founding director of the Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, for a discussion about the system of fear and control installed by the Nazis, its impact on the national cultural landscape, and artists’ strategies of survival. This event is part of the 2025-26 KHC and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Resistance, Resilience and Reinvention: Artists and Academics Escaping Nazism.” It is co-sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center in White Plains; the Center for Genocide and Human Rights Research in Africa and the Diaspora at Northeastern Illinois University; the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human [...]

Oct 23, 2025

From Vienna to Movies:
Costume Designer Ruth Morley at 100, a birthday commemoration.
Presentation by Melissa Hacker and Susan Gammie

Rachel Stern2025-11-21T07:00:38-05:00October 23rd, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on From Vienna to Movies:
Costume Designer Ruth Morley at 100, a birthday commemoration.
Presentation by Melissa Hacker and Susan Gammie

In this virtual event, the life and work of Costume Designer Ruth Morley will be discussed by her daughter Melissa Hacker and Susan Gammie, her assistant, protégé and close friend. Ruth Morley (1925-1991) fled her childhood home in Vienna on a Kindertransport as an unaccompanied child refugee, arrived in New York City as a teenager, and became a noted costume designer whose career spanned decades and disciplines, including dance, opera, theater, film and television. Her film credits include American classics Tootsie, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, The Chosen, Kramer vs Kramer and The Hustler; her theater, opera and dance credits include Death of Salesman (with Dustin Hoffman), The Threepenny Opera, Deathtrap, Miracle Worker (stage and film, for the film, she received an Oscar nomination), Billy Budd, the Golem, and many more. Television includes Playing for Time with Vanessa Redgrave and Mussolini with George C [...]

Oct 19, 2025

Confronting the Holocaust in Midcentury American Art
Presentation by Jennifer McComas, Bloomington (Indiana)

Rachel Stern2025-11-12T13:39:10-05:00October 19th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Confronting the Holocaust in Midcentury American Art
Presentation by Jennifer McComas, Bloomington (Indiana)

The Holocaust’s profound impact on midcentury American art has been underrecognized and understudied. Jennifer McComas, curator of the current exhibition Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art and primary author of the accompanying catalogue, explores the ways that American artists—American-born, immigrants, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and Holocaust survivors—confronted the Holocaust in their work during the war and in the decades just after. Image above: Anna Walinska (American, born England, 1906-1997), Survivors – Exodus, 1958. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in. (152.4 x 213.4 cm). Gift of Rosina Rubin, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2023.29. © Atelier Anna Walinska. Photo: Shanti Knight. [...]

Aug 12, 2025

The Three Exiles of the German-born artist Samson Schames (1898-1967)
Conversation with Annika Friedman (Germany), Rachel Dickson, PhD (UK) and Ori Z Soltes, PhD (USA)

Rachel Stern2025-09-26T07:49:38-04:00August 12th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on The Three Exiles of the German-born artist Samson Schames (1898-1967)
Conversation with Annika Friedman (Germany), Rachel Dickson, PhD (UK) and Ori Z Soltes, PhD (USA)

In this virtual event, a transatlantic panel discusses the artist Samson Schames. Annika Friedman (Germany) elaborates on the artist’s beginnings in Frankfurt, Rachel Dickson, PhD (UK) gives an insight into the work he made in British exile, and Ori Z. Soltes, PhD (USA) speaks about the work he created in his new home, New York. The presentations are followed by a moderated discussion and Q&A. Image above: Samson Schames, Granite Quarry No. 1, 1958. Casein on board, 20.75 in. x 26.25 in. Leo Baeck Institute New York 2007.97 Samson Schames was a German-Jewish artist born in 1898 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, into a prominent Jewish family involved in the textile business. He initially trained [...]

Aug 11, 2025

Samson Schames (1898-1967): Family and Friends
Conversation with Natalie Green Giles, James McCaffrey and Charlie Scheidt.
Moderated by William Weitzer

Rachel Stern2025-09-26T07:54:22-04:00August 11th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Samson Schames (1898-1967): Family and Friends
Conversation with Natalie Green Giles, James McCaffrey and Charlie Scheidt.
Moderated by William Weitzer

In this virtual event, a distinguished panel comprising family members, friends, and their descendants from New York share memories of the German-born artist Samson Schames (1898-1967). His work, which blends modernist aesthetics with spiritual and historical depth, is recognized for its innovative technique and poignant reflections on exile, memory, and identity. Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, he fled Nazi persecution to England in 1939 and later emigrated to the United States with his future wife, Edith, in 1948 and 1947. Image above: Samson Schames, Blowing the Shofar, c. 1956. Shards of glass, polychrome, layered in relief, 25.4 x 29.7 in. (64.5 x 75.5 cm). Jewish Museum Frankfurt A short film created [...]

Aug 4, 2025

Theodore Fried (1902-1980): In Hiding and Beyond
Presentation by Sofia Thornblad, Tulsa (OK)

Rachel Stern2025-09-03T14:31:57-04:00August 4th, 2025|Events, Lectures, Past Events|Comments Off on Theodore Fried (1902-1980): In Hiding and Beyond
Presentation by Sofia Thornblad, Tulsa (OK)

This presentation explores the historical background and creative works of Hungarian-born Jewish artist Theodore Fried (1902-1980). He was educated at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Vienna in 1924 and to Paris in 1925. He met and married his first wife Anna and his son Christopher was born in 1928. That same year, the artist had his first one-man show, and was included in important shows in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Paris. Image above: Detail of Theodore Fried, Self Portrait, 1938. Oil on canvas. Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, Tulsa (OK) When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fried’s work was labeled as “degenerate”. He fled with [...]