Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

Current Authors

Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series 2025-2026

Left, book cover showing 3 people, a mother, father, and young child, standing in front of a barrack apartment, with text: Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, Tracy Slater, overlaid by an American flag.

Photo Credit: (Tracy Slater): Patricia Shinkoda

Tracy Slater, "Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp"

September 18, 2025

12:30 pm EDT | Online

Cosponsored by the Brandeis University Alumni Association

Together in Manzanar brings into focus the dark episode in American history, set in motion by the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the US government imprisoned in detention camps tens of thou­sands of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans due to the unfounded fear of anyone in America with even “one drop” of Japanese blood. Among the incar­cer­at­ed were over 2,000 mem­bers of mixed-race fam­i­lies — includ­ing Elaine Buchman Yoneda, a Jew­ish American woman, Karl Yoneda, her Japan­ese Amer­i­can husband, and their three-year-old son, Tommy. Slater’s intimate account explores painful choices and conflicting loyalties, including Elaine’s leaving behind her White daugh­ter from a pre­vi­ous marriage, the upheaval and violence that followed, and the Yonedas’ quest to survive with their children’s lives intact and their family safe and whole.

Tracy Slater is an American writer from Boston living temporarily in Toronto, although usually based in Japan, her husband's country. Her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Best Women's Travel Writing, The Boston Globe, and Literary Hub, among other places. Slater’s first book, The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self and Home on the Far Side of the World, was published in 2015. Slater received her doctorate in English and American Literature from Brandeis University and taught for ten years at various Boston-area universities as well as in men's and women's prisons throughout Massachusetts.

Together in Manzanar is available at Chicago Review Press, Amazon, and your local bookseller.

Register to join.

Additional authors coming soon.