USHMM: 2024 Joseph & Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture- Preserving Shared History: Art in Internment during the Holocaust

The Nazi party introduced antisemitic exclusionary laws shortly after Adolf Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1933. While Jews were the primary target of persecution and murder, those who did not fit the “Aryan” ideal espoused by the Nazis were also persecuted under exclusionary regulations, including Black people, and Sinti and Roma in Germany, among others. This year’s Meyerhoff Annual Lecture will explore work produced by Jewish and Black artists interned during the Holocaust and World War II.

Speakers will pay special attention to Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s work with children in the Theresienstadt ghetto and Josef Nassy’s visual diary of his life in the Laufen and Tittmoning internment camps for enemy aliens. They will discuss the importance of art in documenting persecution and murder, while bearing witness to the atrocities and preserving the stories of those who endured the Holocaust—including the stories of victim groups othered in society.

Speakers
Sarah Phillips Casteel, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University

Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University at Buffalo

Moderator
Danielle Battisti, Department Chair, Associate Professor of History, University of Nebraska Omaha

This in-person or virtual discussion is free and open to the public. Registration is required to receive the link to watch.

Register here.