Events
View our past events page to watch recorded events.
Subscribe to our mailing list for reminders about our upcoming events.
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 2, April 3, and April 20.
Guided Tours: March 23, 1 pm • April 6, 2 pm • April 15, 2 pm
Tour in Yiddish: March 19, 12:30 pm. Join student docent, Elizabeth Cross and students from Professor Ellie Kellman’s advanced Yiddish program for this Yiddish language guided tour.
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 18, 2026
Presentation: 5:30 - 7 pm
Reception: 7 - 8:30 pm | Heavy hors d’oeuvres and dessert will be served and dietary laws will be observed.
Napoli/Nessel Room, Gosman Athletic Center, Brandeis University | Parking is available. Details will be provided closer to the date.
Join HBI to celebrate the launch of A Force for Good (Casemate IPM, March 3, 2026), Anita Wyzanski Robboy’s biography of her mother, Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth, social standing, and extraordinary determination to save countless Jewish children from annihilation during the Holocaust.
Drawing on a trove of letters and documents preserved by her mother and discovered decades later, HBI Research Associate Anita Wyzanski Robboy brings Gisela’s story vividly to life. In conversation with renowned Jewish historian Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Emeritus, at Brandeis University. Robboy will explore her mother’s tireless rescue work across Germany, Palestine, England, and the U.S., and reflect on what her extraordinary life teaches us about Jewish leadership, moral responsibility, and the enduring power of individual courage in times of crisis.
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event, and are also available at Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
(L) Image: Luba Krugman-Gurdus, "Mother". New York: Hatekufah Publishing House, 1949. Courtesy of The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum Lohamei HaGeta'ot. Photo credit Sasho Pedro.
March 19, 2026
6 - 8 pm | Kniznick Gallery, Epstein Building, 515 South Street, Waltham
Light refreshments and tour to follow.
In honor of Women’s History Month, join us for a special collaboration between the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Consulate General of Israel to New England. We will offer a musical perspective on the current exhibition Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949 by scholar and guest curator Rachel E. Perry, PhD.
Two Israeli musicians and two local American musicians were selected to perform and discuss their original works composed specifically in response to the exhibition. Each musician, through their own musical language, engages with the complexity of creation as an encounter with the past—and as an act of reclaiming authorship and narrative. The original compositions allow for conversation with the exhibition; extending its themes through sound, voice, and live performance. This is an evening that creates a space for listening, reflection, and continued dialogue.
Lihi Haruvi is known as a passionate improviser with a strong belief in the healing power of music, Haruvi is an acclaimed performer, composer and educator. She is a faculty member at Berklee College of Music and MIT, and her saxophone can be heard on more than 30 albums to date and stages worldwide.
Lee Gilboa is a composer, scholar, and audio engineer. As a composer, she is focused on spatial audio and primarily uses pre-recorded speech, vocal processing, and audio spatialization techniques in order to engage with themes such as the sonic identity, representation, collectivity, and self-expression. Committed to practice-based research, these themes occupy her scholarly work as well. Her current research examines the role that listening assumes in the socio-political sphere through a rigorous investigation of testifying voices.
Lynn Torgove is a long time member of both Emmanuel Music and the Cantata Singers, and is well known to Boston audiences as a singer and director. She is a member of HBI’s Holocaust Research Study Group. She will be accompanied by Becky Wexler, a clarinetist. Her versatility is highlighted in her repertoire, which ranges from chamber and orchestral music to klezmer, Balkan, Dixieland, American folk, and improvisations on Taize chant.
Register to attend (registration recommended).
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.
Photo Credit: Sarah Wood
March 26, 2026
Winner, 75th National Jewish Book Award in Education & Jewish Identity
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series in partnership with The Jewish Library of Baltimore
7 - 8:15 pm | The Jewish Library of Baltimore, 5700 Park Heights Avenue, Baltimore
Miriam Udel’s rich and original Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children's Literature explores the world of Jewish literature - over a 1000 books and several periodicals - written for Yiddish-speaking children from Europe to the Americas during the 20th century when the community clung to Jewish heritage, while also working to help their children makes sense of being a Jew in the modern world. Udel elegantly traces how these stories and poems underpinned new formulations of secular Jewishness, creating a world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.
Miriam Udel is an associate professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from Harvard University and was ordained in 2019 at Yeshivat Maharat. Udel is the author of Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press), winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience and the editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2020), winner of the Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.
HBI is delighted to have supported Udel’s research for Modern Jewish Worldmaking. During her residency as an HBI Scholar in 2022, Udel explored the "New Girl", a central character in Yiddish literature, "a creature of freedom" who gets lost, then "finds herself and uncovers resources that exceed anyone’s wildest imaginings".
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event and are also available at Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
Registration to attend is recommended. Register here.
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? is on exhibit 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.
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.