Today's Hours:
Speakers: President Nancy Niemi, Rabbi Sam Blumberg, Millie Gonzalez, Professor Leslie Starobin
Date/Time: September 12, 2024 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Location: Henry Whittemore Library, Gallery, Framingham State University
Audience: Open to the public. No registration required.
Description: The Library will host an opening reception to officially commemorate the exhibit's opening. The event will begin with brief opening remarks from Framingham State University President Nancy Niemi, Rabbi Sam Blumberg, and Library Dean Millie Gonzalez. The remainder of the time will allow visitors to interact with the exhibit.
The event will also feature Prof. Leslie Starobin's work, including a selection from the documentary Marching All Night: The Testimony of Dorka Berger née Altman, inspired by a survivor’s account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Both the history of World War II and Holocaust memory inform the artist's photographic works and still-life montages on display at the library.
Leslie Starobin is a Professor Emerita of Art at Framingham State University. Her photographs, photo-narratives, and still-life montages are inspired by people and places steeped in family history, enriched by cultural traditions, and central to world history and the environment. Starobin’s artwork is in the permanent collection of many American museums, including the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Jewish Museum, NY, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
Speaker: Professor Daniel Greene, Northwestern University, and scholar for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Date/Time: September 18, 2024 7:00pm – 8:00pm
Audience: Open to the public. No registration required.
Location: Dwight Hall Auditorium, Framingham State University
Description: What did Americans know about the dangers of Nazism, and when did they know it? Americans and the Holocaust answers these questions as it provides a comprehensive look at the American public's responses to Nazism. This talk will focus on the domestic conditions in the United States—including economic depression, isolationism, xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism—that shaped Americans' responses to atrocities abroad. The lecture will also consider why rescuing Europe's Jews never became a priority for the U.S. government or the majority of the American people.
Dr. Daniel Greene is the Subject Matter Expert at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. He curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened in 2018 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary. The exhibition also inspired The U.S. and the Holocaust, an Emmy-winning documentary film directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, which aired on PBS in the fall of 2022. Greene’s co-edited (with Edward Phillips) book, Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2022. His first book The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana University Press, 2011) won the American Jewish Historical Society's Saul Viener Prize in 2012.
Facilitator: Professor Sally Shafto
Date/Time: September 25, 2024 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Audience: 45 person limit, open to Framingham State University students, staff and faculty
Location: Henry Whittemore Library, Room 222, Framingham State University
Description: The Zone of Interest (2023) is a historical drama written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel of the same name. Glazer's streamlined adaptation differs from the novel in many ways, including omitting various characters, plot lines, and language. The film, set in 1943, focuses on the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig. The Zone of Interest examines the day-to-day routine of the Höss family, who occupied a villa in the "Zone of Interest" next to the largest Nazi concentration camp.
Sally Shafto is an Associate Professor at Framingham State University and a scholar of French New Wave cinema and international art films. Her publications include editing and translating the Writings of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (New York: Sequence Press, 2016) and the upcoming translation of Chris Marker’s early writings on film (1948–1955), edited by Steven Ungar and published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Date/Time: On view October 12, 2024 – January 26, 2025
Location: Danforth Art Museum, 14 Vernon Street, Framingham Centre
Description: Antisemitic persecution in Europe sent waves of Jewish refugees (primarily from Nazi Germany and the Pale of Settlement in Russia) to Boston and other parts of the United States. The work of three artists from the Danforth’s Permanent Collection bears witness to their desire to maintain a connection with their Jewish heritage and to never forget their experiences. Karl Zerbe’s Ghetto series is a testament to the struggle to survive the Nazi’s segregation of the Jews from the rest of the population before the Holocaust. Hyman Bloom’s Rabbi with Torah--quick sketches drawn with red pencil on upcycled stationary--vividly display religious threads from his upbringing in a Jewish village in Latvia to his childhood in Boston. The brilliantly saturated painting of a Torah Cover by Renee Rothbein displays her relationship with Judaism.
The selection of these works from the Danforth Art Museum’s Permanent Collection are installed in the Danforth’s gallery to complement the themes covered in Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibition on view and open to the public in the Whittemore Library at Framingham State University.
Speaker: Dr. Damion Thomas, scholar at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture
Date/Time: October 3, 2024 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Location: Center for Inclusive Excellence, Framingham State University
Audience: Open to the public. No registration required.
Description: Almost 100 years later, Jesse Owens's four-gold medal performance at the 1936 Olympics still garners widespread attention. The socio-political context of the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany has led to competing narratives about the meaning of Jesse Owens's accomplishments. This lecture aims to explore the complex and often conflicting narratives told about Owens, the 1936 Olympics, and U.S. race relations.
Dr. Damion Thomas is an educator, author, and the museum curator of sports for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He holds a doctorate degree in United States History from UCLA and prior to joining the museum, taught as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland—College Park and the University of Illinois—Urbana/Champaign. Dr. Thomas' curriculum focused on sports throughout U.S. history, sports and black masculinity, and sports and race relations in the United States. He is the author of Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics, available from the University of Illinois Press.
Speaker: Professor Lori Gemeiner Bihler
Date/Time: October 8, 2024 5:00pm - 7:00pm (collecting event) and 7:00pm - 7:45pm (scholar talk)
Location: Village Hall, 2 Oak Street, Framingham Centre (40 parking spots available in front of building, additional parking available across the street at NorthEast Community Bank, 35 Edgell Road)
Audience: Open to the public. No registration required
Description: The Framingham History Center and the Henry Whittemore Library will co-host a community collecting event and scholar talk centered around the experiences of Jewish immigrants arriving in the U.S. during the 1940s. The goal of the community collecting event is to provide area residents the opportunity to share meaningful artifacts and stories which the digital archivist can then capture and create an online digital collection. Visitors may bring up to three items to be photographed or scanned, such as old photographs, letters, postcards, pieces of clothing, textiles, and other artifacts. Artifacts pertaining to the theme of the Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibition including the Holocaust, World War II, and local history during this time period, should relate to one's own experience or that of a family member. Once the artifact is scanned or photographed, the Henry Whittemore Library will create an online digital collection that will be available in our repository and serve a wonderful way to showcase the community's treasured memories for all to view.
The collective event will be followed by a presentation given by Dr. Lori Gemeiner Bihler. Dr. Bihler is an Associate Professor of History at Framingham State University, where she teaches courses on modern European, U.S., and world history. Her research focuses on the refugee diaspora fleeing Nazi Germany before and during the war, as well as the role of race and religion on past migration and resettlement. Dr. Bihler is the author of Cities of Refuge: German Jews in London and New York, 1935-1945 (SUNY Press, 2018) and has received research fellowships from the British Council, the DAAD, and the Leo Baeck Institute. In addition, she is currently working on a book about history education and each spring semester, Dr. Bihler supervises matriculating social studies student teachers across the region.
Facilitator: Weronika Zawora
Date/Time: October 9, 2024 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location: Henry Whittemore Library, Room UM14, Framingham State University.
Audience: Open to the public. No registration required.
Description: Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow is a 2023 book about fascist sympathizers in 1930s America including the Silver Legion of America, the American White Guard, the Christian Front, and the propaganda operation of Georg Vierick.
Weronika Zawora is the Outreach and Student Engagement Coordinator at the Henry Whittemore Library. Born in Poland, her family lost relatives in the Holocaust and she has visited numerous historical sites throughout the region related to the events of World War II, including several concentration camps. Since becoming a U.S. citizen two years ago, Ms. Zawora has become even more committed and passionate about learning how the past informs our choices in the present.
Copies of the book are available for borrowing to all Minuteman cardholders.