Events
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Upcoming Events
Helmar Lerski (1871–1956), "Hände einer Graphikerin (Lea Grundig)", Ca. 1944. Vintage print, 11 7/8 x 9 1/2 in., [Series: 'Menschliche Hände' | 'Human Hands'], Courtesy of Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
Exhibition Dates: January 27 to April 30, 2026 | Kniznick Gallery
Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 am-4 pm • Friday and Sunday 12 pm-4 pm • Closed Saturday. Please note: gallery closed April 1, April 2, April 3, April 8, and April 20.
Guided Tours: March 23, 1 pm • April 6, 2 pm • April 15, 2 pm
Between 1944 and 1949, scores of survivors created graphic narratives of their personal and collective experiences under Nazi persecution. Who Will Draw Our History? introduces ten Jewish women who survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and outside the Warsaw ghetto under “Aryan” papers and then, days after their liberation, began recording their memories in images and words. Lacking photographs of what they witnessed and endured, they turned to visual storytelling to represent Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, particularly as it affected women.
This exhibition showcases their little-known “books of memories”: wordless novels, handmade albums, pictorial diaries, illustrated books and portfolios. Culled from private collections and museum archives around the world, these works contribute vital evidentiary material about the Holocaust, but they also reveal how the “return to life” was experienced and represented. In so doing, they radically transform how we understand the role and reach of art in early survivor publications, exhibitions, and community building.
Arriving at a crucial moment, as we near an age “after testimony,” Who Will Draw Our History? brings together these works of early Holocaust memory for the first time, placing them within their historical and cultural context.
Brandeis Cosponsors: Brandeis President’s Initiative on Antisemitism, Brandeis Library, The Center for German and European Studies, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. Community Cosponsors: Studio Israel (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, Vilna Shul), The German Consulate of Boston, The Israeli Consulate of Boston.
March 23, 2026
HBI Seminar Series
Adriana M. Brodsky, PhD, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, HBI Scholar in Residence
12 - 1 pm EDT | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
This presentation will focus on the ways that participation in Argentina’s Zionist youth groups from the 1940s to the 1970s changed the lives of young women. Sephardi young women, whose lives had been limited to the home and family, became active public figures within their communities, assuming the roles of teachers, public speakers, researchers, and counselors to younger children. These young women learned new skills as they embarked on organizing lectures, researching topics, and venturing outside the homes. The youth groups also exposed young women to novel ideas like sex education and free love, which affected their understanding of family traditions, creating conflicts with their parents and community leaders. Those who moved to Israel found kibbutz family life challenging to their new and old customs.
Adriana M. Brodsky is Professor of Latin American and Jewish History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She has published on Sephardi food, schools, beauty contests, and Latin American Jewish History in general. She is currently finishing a manuscript on Argentine youth in Zionist movements (1940s-1970s). She is co-President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). Her most recent publication, Jews Across the Americas is co-edited with Laura Leibman and follows her book, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine: Creating Community and National Identity, 1880-1960, (Indiana University Press, 2016).
At HBI, Brodsky is continuing her work with Argentine youth in Zionist movements, focusing specifically on women.
(R) Agnes Lukacs, verso of “Osszebujva” [Close Together], ink drawing, Hungarian National Museum, Budapest. Design by Karin Rosenthal
April 14, 2026
Yom HaShoah
1 - 3 pm EDT | Hybrid: In-Person at the HBI Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
Please join HBI’s Holocaust Research Study Group (HRSG) for this hybrid event commemorating Yom HaShoah. Our discussions of women in the arts will help us understand how women’s experiences shape the larger Holocaust narrative.
Presentations by HRSG members include: Lynn Torgove’s work creating Frauenstimmen: Women’s Voices from the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, A Musical Cabaret and Rachel Perry’s perspectives on the art show she recently curated, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944 - 1949. HRSG members Laurel Leff, a journalist, will frame our discussion, and Karin Rosenthal, a fine art photographer, will show images remembering family lost in the Holocaust.
The art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? will be open from 10-4 pm that day and docent tours are available before and after the program. The exhibit runs through April 30 at the Kniznick Gallery.
April 23, 2026
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online
While writing the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (HarperCollins, 2020), Judy Batalion was drawn into the cosmopolitan society of inter-war Warsaw - a city filled with theaters, cabaret, and nightclubs with revolving dance floors - that had created these extraordinary young women. Batalion’s debut novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, shines a light on this rarely explored world through the lives of two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them.
Judy Batalion is the author of several books of award-winning nonfiction including The Light of Days, The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos and her work has appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, and many other publications.
HBI was honored to support The Last Woman of Warsaw in 2022 with an Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Award on Women, Gender and the Holocaust as well as The Light of Days with several research awards.
The Last Woman of Warsaw will be published on April 7, 2026 and is available for pre-order now.
This is a companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, at the Kniznick Gallery, January 27 - April 30.
Top: Elżbieta Nadel (later Elisheva Landau), Z Czarnej Teki, 1939–1945 (From the Black Album, 1939-1945), Prague, 1946. Courtesy of the artist’s estate, Photo by Sasha Pedro. Bottom: Image credit: Yinka Shonibare CBE, Sanctuary City, 2024.
April 24, 2026
12 - 2 pm | Beginning in the Kniznick Gallery, Epstein Building and concluding at the Rose Art Museum
Join us for an afternoon of art and reflection across Brandeis University. We will begin at the Kniznick Gallery with a tour of Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944–1949. Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD, the exhibition introduces 10 women Holocaust survivors, who days after their liberation, began recording their memories in images and words. Exhibited together for the first time, these graphic narratives contribute vital artistic and evidentiary material about the Holocaust, its aftermath, and its survivors.
From there, we will walk together to the Rose Art Museum to discuss works in Photorealism in Focus and Fabricated Imaginaries: Crafting Art as they relate to the diasporic Jewish experience and the role of artists as truth-tellers. We will then close by inviting visitors to experience Yinka Shonibare: Sanctuary, the U.S. debut of the British Nigerian artist’s powerful and immersive installation Sanctuary City (2024). Composed of 18 scaled-down replicas of historical and contemporary buildings that have served as sites of refuge, Sanctuary City invites us to reflect on the fragility of protection and confront our responsibilities to one another.
April 27, 2026
HBI Seminar Series
Tamar Aizenberg, HBI Scholar in Residence
12 - 1 pm EDT | Hybrid: In-Person at HBI | Liberman-Miller Lecture Hall and Online
Tamar Aizenberg’s current project is an experiential history of the grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors and the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators – the so-called third generations – in Austria, Germany, and the United States. In this talk, Aizenberg will discuss common patterns in how these grandchildren learn about their family histories from their grandparents and their parents. Focusing on how the gender of the grandparents, parents, and grandchildren influences the transmission of stories, this talk explores the ways narratives about the Holocaust and the Third Reich are told, edited, or silenced within families.
Tamar Aizenberg is a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University. Her areas of research are Holocaust memory, German Studies, and oral history. Aizenberg’s research has been supported by several fellowships, including a Fulbright Student Fellowship, a Joseph Wulf Fellowship, and an EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship, and by grants from HBI, the Tauber Institute, and the Max Kade Foundation. During the 2024-25 academic year, she was a Research Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. Along with her academic work, Aizenberg serves as the Peer Review Associate at In geveb.
May 7, 2026
12:30 - 1:30 pm EDT | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Edited by Goldie Morgentaler, PhD
Translated by Krzysztof Majer and Sylvia Söderlind
Letters from the Afterlife chronicles the experiences of two Holocaust survivors as they adjusted to life in their adopted countries of Canada and Sweden. Childhood friends in Poland, Chava Rosenfarb (1923 - 2011) and Zenia Larsson (1922 - 2007) lived through the Lodz Ghetto and the death camps together, parting soon after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen. For the next fifty years, they continued their friendship through letters written in Polish. Despite their continuing traumas and insecurities, Rosenfarb and Larsson went on to become distinguished novelists in their respective languages, Yiddish and Swedish.
After Chava Rosenfarb’s death in 2011, Goldie Morgentaler, Rosenfarb’s daughter, found a stash of Chava’s letters written in Polish to Zenia from 1945 to 1971. In bringing Chava's letters together with Zenia’s side of the correspondence, taken from the book Zenia published in Swedish in 1972, Morgentaler has created a testament to an emotional attachment between two women writers who had suffered through some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century and emerged with their humanity and ability to love intact.
Goldie Morgentaler is Professor Emerita at the University of Lethbridge, where she taught 19th-century British and American literature and modern Jewish literature. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of much of Chava Rosenfarb's work, including Rosenfarb’s epic Holocaust trilogy, The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto.
Letters from the Afterlife: The Post-Holocaust Correspondence of Chava Rosenfarb and Zenia Larsson is available at McGill-Queens University Press, Amazon, Bookshop, and your local bookseller.