Events
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Upcoming Events
January 26, 2026
HBI Seminar Series
Edith Pick, PhD, HBI Postdoctoral Associate
12 - 1 pm EST | Online
This talk explores how Jewish women – mothers in particular – organize at the intersection of gender and nationalism, in Israel and the diaspora. Drawing on contemporary examples of maternal activism, it asks how women’s voices as mothers reveal diverse relationships with national identities and narratives, militarism, and the Jewish state, and how mothers’ groups position themselves in relation to feminism, including its liberal, radical, and anti-feminist forms. The talk also examines how these political visions and organizational models travel transnationally between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.
Edith Pick holds a PhD in Business and Management from Queen Mary University of London, and in her dissertation explored “the construction of diversity and difference in UK Jewish nonprofit organisations.”
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
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.
Collection of Six Graphic Holocaust Books. Copyright, Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection. Photographer, Noam Feiner.
January 27, 2026
Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949
5 - 7:30 pm | Kniznick Gallery | Light kosher refreshments will be served.
Guest Curated by Rachel E. Perry, PhD
Olivia Baldwin, Rosalie and Jim Shane Curator & Arts Coordinator, Kniznick Gallery
Image: Collection of Six Graphic Holocaust Books — Zofia Rozenstrauch, Auschwitz Death Camp, Warsaw, 1945; Regina Lichter, 1939-1945, Florence, 1946; Lea Grundig, In the Valley of Slaughter, Tel Aviv, 1944; Agnes Lukacs, Auschwitz Women's Camp, Budapest, 1946; Luba Krugman Gurdus, They Didn't Live to See, New York, 1949.
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.
Book cover: Andi Arnovitz, “The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife” (2009), Japanese paper, hair, dirt, film and threads, 110 x 46 x 13 cm.
January 29, 2026
12:30 pm EST | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
A Brandeis University Press publication in the HBI Series on Jewish Women, Beyond Brutality is a feminist reading of one of the most troubling tractates of the Talmud addresses family law including laws relating to a sotah (a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery).
Beyond Brutality draws on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Professor Jane Kanarek brings to light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text. Despite the brutality of the sotah ritual—in which the woman accused of adultery is put through a divine ordeal intended to reveal her innocence or her guilt—this book demonstrates that Bavli Sotah is not primarily concerned with describing the sotah ritual or establishing male control over women. Instead, Bavli Sotah becomes an instructive text in which the sotah is secondary to moral and sinning men. As the sotah herself fades into the background, the sotah ritual nevertheless overflows its boundaries and weaves its way through a range of other topics within the tractate. In the process, Bavli Sotah teaches its audience who transmits and how one transmits rabbinic culture.
Rabbi Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and the co-editor of Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How it Happens and Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, the latter two of which were finalists for the National Jewish Book Awards. Her work has been published in AJS Review, Teaching Theology and Religion, the Journal of Jewish Education, and Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.
Beyond Brutality, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah is available at Brandeis University Press and many booksellers.
(L) Helmar Lerski, "Lea Grundig Drawing Hands", c. 1944, © Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
February 10, 2026
4 - 5 pm EST | Online
As a companion event to HBI’s art exhibition, Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949, we will host an online panel discussion with experts on contemporary Jewish women's graphic novels. Moderated byWho Will Draw Our History? guest curator Rachel Perry, PhD, the program will bring the works in the exhibit into dialogue with 21st century approaches to visual storytelling.
Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949 will be in the Kniznick Gallery until April 30.
Speakers include:
Victoria Aarons, PhD, Trinity University, editor, “The Story's Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives” (Wayne State University Press, 2025).
Tahneer Oksman, PhD, Marymount Manhattan College, author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs” (Columbia University Press, 2016), contributor, “The Story's Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives”.
Charlotte Schallié, PhD, University of Victoria, BC, Project lead and co-director, Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project, editor of the award-winning collection of graphic novels But I Live. Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
February 26, 2026
11:30 am - 12:30 pm EST | Online
Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
Shattered Liberation: Sexualized Violence Against Holocaust Survivors, 1943–1946 challenges the notion of joyous liberation of Holocaust survivors by the Red Army by shining light on the sexualized violence that some Holocaust survivors, in this case, Jewish women, endured in the hands of the Soviet Army, partisans, rescuers, and army personnel during the liberation process. The twelve contributors to this work explore a wide range of interactions through testimonies and memoirs including sexual violence, rape, forced cohabitation, sex barter, aid, and romance, and in doing so, uncover a far more complicated, if not devastating, reality.
Joanna Beata Michlic, PhD, is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Education, Practice and Society, UCL and Affiliate Faculty in Gratz College's Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Antisemitism Studies Departments. A current HBI Research Associate, Michlic was founder of the HBI Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust as well as a past visiting professor in Holocaust and Contemporary history at Lund University. Her many books include Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and Jewish Family 1939 –Present: History, Representation, and Memory, (Brandeis University Press, 2017, HBI Series on Jewish Women). Her forthcoming publication, Through the Eyes of Jewish Child Survivors from Poland: Family, War, Identity and Nationhood is expected in May 2026.
Shattered Liberation, co-edited by Joanna Michlic, PhD, Nina Paulovicova, PhD, and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, PhD, is available at Purdue University Press, Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller.
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.
March 8, 2026
Lecture: 4 - 5:30 pm | Reception: 5:30 - 6:30 pm
Wasserman Cinematheque, Sachar 117, Brandeis School of Business and Economics, 415 South St., Waltham
In observance of International Women's Day, HBI is honored to host Pamela S. Nadell, PhD, author of Antisemitism, an American Tradition (W.W. Norton, 2025), as the 2026 Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights guest speaker. Professor Nadell will deliver this lecture with a particular focus on American Jewish women’s experience of antisemitism.
Professor Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. She is the author of nine books, including America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today which won the 2019 National Jewish Book Award’s Everett Family Foundation “Book of the Year” and was translated into Hebrew.
The Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture Series was created by Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law founder Sylvia Neil and her husband Dan Fischel in memory of Sylvia’s late sister, Diane Markowicz, to honor her commitment to gender equality and social justice. The Lecture Series features internationally renowned scholars, judges and activists discussing ways of negotiating the tensions between gender equality and religious or cultural norms. Read more about the Markowicz Memorial Lecture Series.
Books will be available for purchase at the event and are also available at most booksellers.
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.
Brandeis University Faculty Club | 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 at the event and will also be available at Bookshop, Amazon, and your local bookseller on March 3, 2026.
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
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.
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.