Making Global Connections

Scroll below for links to all of our recorded programs by semester and by theme. You can also explore our curated YouTube playlists by clicking here.

2022-23 Event Recordings

Holocaust Commemoration/Yom HaShoah 2023 
Preserving Jewish History: Exploring Centropa’s Library of Rescued Memories
Recorded on April 18, 2023
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Centropa was founded in Vienna and Budapest in 2000 with the goal of preserving and disseminating Jewish memory before the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the former Soviet Union. Dr. Lauren Granite, Centropa’s Director of Education in North America, discusses how the organization interviewed over 1,200 elderly Jewish people and digitized over 25,000 privately-held family photographs and personal documents to create thematic websites, multimedia films, traveling exhibitions, educational programs, and illustrated books.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Dramatic Engagement: The Arts and Holocaust Education
Recorded on March 15, 2023
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Join Dr. Janet Rubin, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Visual and Performing Arts, Humanities, and Speech at Eastern Florida State College, as she demonstrates how the power of theater can be harnessed within the classroom to encourage a deeper understanding of the Holocaust while directly connecting students with survivors. Dr. Rubin provides methodologies and resources on teaching about this tragic historical event through performance.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Surviving the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan: Sohaila Kakar’s Refugee Journey
Recorded on February 22, 2023
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In Afghanistan, Sohaila Kakar was a practicing surgeon; then, in 2021, the Taliban regained control over the country. Join us as Sohaila discusses life before and after the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan–and the physical, economic, and psychological toll it had upon her family as they fled. Her story also highlights the compassionate work done by Upwardly Global, the non-profit agency that provided guidance to Sohaila’s family as they settled in the U.S.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Teaching The Beauty in Breaking: A Workshop for Educators
Recorded on February 15, 2023
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Join Queensborough Community College (QCC) professors Dr. Angela Ridinger-Dotterman and Dr. Ilse Schrynemakers as they share pedagogical strategies for integrating the KHC’s Nazi Concentration Camps virtual and in-person exhibition into the teaching of this year’s QCC Common Read text, The Beauty in Breaking by Dr. Michelle Harper. Harper, an ER surgeon, shares her memories from inside the emergency room and her own spiritual journey towards healing from trauma. All college faculty and staff are invited to attend and learn ways to bring even the smallest parts of this memoir into the post-pandemic college classroom. 

KHC-NEH Lecture
Deconstructing Atrocity Imagery: A Conversation with Dr. Wendy Lower
Recorded on February 8, 2023
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Join Dr. Wendy Lower, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, for a timely conversation about the impact that both historical and contemporary atrocity imagery and traumatic videos have upon our collective psyche. Dr. Lower shares insights from her latest book, The Ravine: A Family: A Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, detailing her investigation of a single photograph—a rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of a family’s murder in Ukraine—which led to new details about the Nazis’ open-air massacres in eastern Europe and a rare case of rescue and postwar justice. The conversation was moderated by Dr. Kathleen Wentrack, Professor and Chair of the Art and Design Department at Queensborough Community College. 

Human Rights and the Museum Series
View from Gold Mountain: Commemorating Asian American Civil Rights Through Monuments
Recorded on February 1, 2023
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Located outside of the Bernalillo County Courthouse in Albuquerque, New Mexico stands View from Gold Mountain, a monument commemorating Territory of N.M. vs. Yee Shun, the 1884 lawsuit that brought about a change in the law allowing Chinese people, and then later non-Christians, to testify in court. Artists Cheryll Leo-Gwin and Stewart Wong discuss the making of this monument and its significance as a landmark court case enshrining civil rights for Asian Americans.

Holocaust Memory/International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023
The Ongoing Legacy and Impact of the Holocaust in U.S. Foreign Policy
Recorded on January 26, 2023
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Holocaust issues manifest themselves in foreign policy in many ways ranging from restitution and compensation for Holocaust survivors to international efforts to counter Holocaust distortion and denial. U.S. Department of State Special Envoy Ellen Germain talks about diplomatic efforts in these areas and how knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust informs current U.S. foreign policy.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Imagining Possibilities: Social Practice as a Pedagogy of Care
Recorded on November 18, 2022
Please email KHC@qcc.cuny.edu for the link

In this workshop, artist-researchers Heather Huggins, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Queensborough Community College (QCC), and Dr. Tania Alice, Professor of Performance Art at Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, share social practices at the intersection of performance and mindfulness, along with concrete examples from their research applying these practices in their campus communities.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Mindfulness and Meditation: Towards a Compassionate Self
Recorded on November 16, 2022
Please email KHC@qcc.cuny.edu for the link

Are you stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed? Do you want to learn how to practice mindfulness and meditation to slow down? Join QCC Professors Alison Cimino, Lecturer of English, and Dr. Joanne Chang, Professor of Music, in this workshop as they help us to deepen awareness, mindfulness, and compassion for self and others, especially during stressful and busy times.

Holocaust Memory/Annual Kristallnacht Commemoration
Keynote: Stones of Memory with Dr. Ruth Mandel 
Recorded on November 9, 2022
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On the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, Dr. Ruth Mandel, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at University College London, discusses her ethnographic research on Stolpersteine (stumbling stones), a counter-memorial art project marking the final homes of Jewish and other victims of Nazi violence found throughout Europe. How do local communities incorporate these street-level brass stones in their commemorations, and how do the stones’ locations in different countries influence these acts of remembrance?

KHC-NEH Lecture
Legacies of Genocide: Mauthausen and its Memorialization
Recorded on November 2, 2022
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Do we have an ethical responsibility toward “violated spaces” like those of a former concentration camp? What legacy do such spaces create for us? And how might cultural differences alter our perceptions of the memorial in our 21^st-century? Dr. Rebecca Rovit, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas, explores the Nazi-era Mauthausen concentration camp as a site of remembrance connected to violence that permeated Austrian soil.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Exploring Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American
Recorded on October 26, 2022
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Laura Gao, author and illustrator of Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American, discusses their own experiences around the themes of trauma, remembrance, and compassion. What are some things that inspired the creation of Messy Roots, and how might readers be able to draw inspiration from Gao’s journey and story as presented in her debut graphic memoir?

KHC-NEH Workshop
Pedagogical Approaches for the KHC’s “Concentration Camps” Exhibit
Recorded on October 19, 2022
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In this workshop, Dr. Cary Lane, Associate Professor at QCC in the English Department, highlights ways instructors can incorporate content and themes from the KHC’s newest original exhibition, The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide. Dr. Lane also introduces faculty and docents to curatorial choices made in the exhibit and how those can connect to thematic teaching.

QCC Welcome Read Event
Creating John Lewis’s March II: A Conversation with Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin
Recorded on October 17, 2022
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Nate Powell and Andrew Aydin share insights and anecdotes about their time spent working on this graphic memoir series. This event is part of the Queensborough Community College (QCC) Welcome Read and is hosted by the Kupferberg Holocaust Center.

The Welcome Read is a pedagogical and community-building experience for Fall 2022 first semester Queensborough (QCC) students taking English classes, in both non-credit programs (CLIP and CUNY Start) and credited courses (ALP, ENGL101). The 2022 Welcome Read texts include, The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman, as well as the graphic memoir, March: Book Two, written by Civil Rights icon and Congressman John Lewis with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. Approximately 600 QCC students will be participating in the Welcome Read, reading, and writing about March: Book One in their classes and attending related events.

Holocaust Memory
Mapping the Holocaust by Bullets
Recorded on October 13, 2022
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Dr. Ewa Schaller, Senior Program Officer, Educator and Education Coordinator at American Friends of Yahad-In Unum, discusses investigations into the fate of the Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union, as well as showcases a new interactive map that features these execution sites, along with archival documentation and eyewitness interviews. For more information about Yahad-In Unum’s work, please visit https://yiu.ngo/en.

Human Rights and the Museum Series
Decolonizing Design and Cultural Symbols
Recorded on September 28, 2022
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This presentation addresses graphic design, propaganda, and the potential for the reclamation or reinterpretation of symbols of cultural imperialism. Curator Darienne Turner will speak about decolonizing design and her exhibition, Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence, which was recently on view at the Baltimore Art Museum. The exhibition explored the multifaceted meanings of the American flag and the way that Lakota women in the early Reservation Period subversively incorporated this symbol of oppression into traditional clothing, allowing participation in cultural activities that had been previously outlawed. Turner is the Assistant Curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas at The Baltimore Museum of Art and is a faculty member at Maryland Institute College of Art.

KHC-NEH Lecture
The Digitization of Genocide Memory: Consequences and Contestation
Recorded on September 28, 2022
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Dr. David J. Simon, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, discusses the memorialization of mass atrocities and genocide across a vast array of digital technologies, including both academic settings and unexpected virtual spaces like Minecraft, YouTube, and TikTok. What are the opportunities for remembrance that are made possible in these diverse spaces? And what are the potential hazards of memorializing mass atrocities and genocide in them? 

KHC-NEH Lecture
Trauma in Digital Spaces: The Future of Holocaust Remembrance
Recorded on September 21, 2022
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What are the complexities of remembering the Holocaust through contemporary technologies? How can digital spaces facilitate compassionate responses to trauma and loss? Dr. Rachel Baum, Deputy Director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, looks at the themes of the year – trauma, remembrance, and compassion – through contemporary technologies (including holograms of Holocaust survivors and virtual reality experiences of memorial sites).