The year began with a brilliant Jewish Studies and HGMS kick-off event featuring former New York Times columnist, and currently a professor of Journalism at Columbia, Sam Freedman. Sam is the author of many books on diverse aspects of US history and culture. This invitation came about after I was honored to be Sam’s student at the Association for Jewish Studies Writing Beyond the Academy Workshop—which was extremely transformative. Twelve of us eager academics who wanted (to use Sam’s phrasing) to cross the street into a more public-facing landscape while Sam was crossing the street into a richer academic hue with his newest book, published by Oxford, Into the Bright Sunshine, about which he spoke—twelve of us sat at YIVO (in the summer of 2023) in New York as Sam’s disciples and soaked up a ton of wisdom from him and a slew of exciting guests whom he invited to share their knowledge as well. I wrote a summary of our time which you can read here.
In addition to having been a NYT columnist, Sam has published in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Salon, Slate, Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet, The Forward, Ha’aretz, and other journals. Sam’s books include; Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000), which won the National Book Award; Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013); and, most recently: Into the Bright Sunshine Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights which won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and which unveils perhaps surprising facts about Humphrey.
As you can see from the range of these titles alone, Sam’s capacious mind has traveled to many shores, and he brings his insight and curiosity to important, and sometimes difficult topics. His talk was riveting and was a wonderful way to start the new semester and to welcome three new faculty in Jewish Studies, Rachelle Grossman, Anastasiia Strakhova, and Eli Rosenblatt. A huge thank you to the Krouse family for endowing this amazing lecture series from which we have benefitted so richly over many years.
We co-sponsored the fascinating films Touristic Intents followed by a conversation between German Professor and Head, Anke Pinkert and director Mat Rappaport, and No. 4 Street of our Lady, with a discussion with filmmaker Judy Maltz.
For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we organized a very special evening, following the suggestion of Klezmer violinist and former librarian at Uni High, Frances Harris. The HGMS team worked tirelessly to bring a beautiful, moving, and quite logistically complex event to the Spurlock Museum on January 27th. Many of us who have conducted research in Holocaust studies have spent untold hours listening to the testimony of survivors. I was in graduate school in the late 1990s during a time when survivor testimony was becoming more and more widespread. There was a big push to record testimonies before the living survivors were gone; now, more than twenty years later, there are only a few survivors left. I was able to interview several survivors in person, most memorably Jacqueline Pery d’Alincourt, who invited me into her Paris apartment one summer morning, and I only emerged close to midnight! (A heavily redacted version of that testimony is here). There is something indescribably powerful about listening to testimony, preferably in person, but via video or even Hologram as in person interviews become more and more scarce. I have witnessed many of the survivors I was able to meet in person passing away.
Individual experiences of the worst imaginable can be approached through testimony, through historical accounts, through fiction, through visual art, dance, opera, and an infinite variety of forms. I argued in my 2007 book Unwanted Beauty that access to the understanding of the worst can be enhanced through artistic rendering. Taking up that same thread and incorporating art—in this case music—into reckoning with the experience of the Shoah, musician and musicologist Zisl Slepovitch, working with a team of collaborators, culled musical moments from survivor testimonies and constructed orchestral scores to accompany those moments. As Slepovitch notes, “songs and poems featured in a number of these testimonies, originally sung in villages and towns, in the ghettos and concentration camps across Central and Eastern Europe, convey the history of that period, in a very personal way.” Frances wrote a wonderful blog about the experience, attended by about 100 people, and the full video is available on the blog. I strongly encourage you to watch, listen, and share this amazing experience! Special thanks to Associate Director Anastasiia Strakhova, and to Frances Harris, Brian Cudiamat, Masumi Iriye, Tamara Chaplin, and everyone who made this visit happen! Enormous thanks to the MillerComm program for major support and to co-sponsors Comparative and World Literature, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, European Union Center, Global Studies, Humanities Research Institute, Russian East European Eurasion Center, Program in Jewish Culture & Society, Slavic, and the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation.
One of my most favorite sorts of events are book launches, and it was extra-moving to host the launch of Anke Pinkert’s Remembering 1989 to an overfull Jewish Studies seminar room because Anke and I have been in a writing group for years. Anke is the head of the German department and a brilliant scholar in memory studies and one of the founding faculty members of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies. She has also worked tirelessly on increasing awareness of the power of the public humanities and in bringing education to incarcerated people through the Education Justice Project. She is the author of many articles in addition to Memory and Film in East Germany. “Remembering 1989: Future Archives of Public Protest (University of Chicago Press, 2024) challenges the dominance of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s unification in global memory in the last decades. The book argues, what has been entirely forgotten today, in the era of (post)neoliberalism, is the interval year of 1989-90 and its multifarious and nonviolent political protest movements. The study recalls this interregnum as a joyous and volatile ‘laboratory of radical democracy’ in the late GDR.” We congratulate Anke on the major achievement of this timely and important work!
On March 28th we hosted the 6th annual HGMS graduate student conference. The past annual symposia were wonderful, and this conference continued to showcase diverse and brilliant work within memory studies (broadly conceived from students at UIUC and UCLA). It was an opportunity to share ideas and resources, to schmooze and connect. It also afforded students a safe space to practice conference papers and receive invaluable feedback from faculty and other graduate students. We invited applications from graduate students working in different fields and with diverse interests. These aspects of memory studies included (but were not limited to): racial aspects of memory, gender and memory, neuroscience, disability studies, how societies remember, the construction of national narratives, discipline and the state, vulnerability, cultural and/or religious practices of memory, museums, archiving, representation and art, sciences of memory (or science and memory), technological aspects of memory, politics of memory, forgetting, erasing, and oversaturating. Sixteen students from Sociology, Comparative and World Literature, English, Landscape Architecture, Political Science, Art History, Spanish, East Asian Languages, and Education shared ideas and connected. On the initiative of Ragini Chakraborty, we invited two stellar keynote speakers to join us via zoom: Rituparna RoyInitiator, Kolkata Partition Museum Project; and Vishwajyoti Ghosh, graphic novelist. They spoke about their projects and it was wonderful to learn about their groundbreaking work. Co-organizers Ragini Chakraborty, Matthew Fam, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Ann Pei, Emerson Pehl and Taisuke Wakabayashi, all chaired sessions and facilitated discussion. We are deeply grateful to sponsorship from CAS, Comparative Literature, CSAMES, and South Asian Studies. Please read the blog about the conference, which includes the link to the keynote speakers, here.
Responding to current events, as an extension of the 2016 series about the rise of the radical right globally, we hosted a What Now? series to offer a space to discuss openly several of the profound challenges of the historical moment we are suffering through a global lens. We explored how trans rights are under attack, how different places in the world, including Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and South Africa, handle the rise of the radical right, and, above all, how much protest matters. The first What Now? which we organized very quickly after the election, and which took place on November 11th, featured Ruby Mendenhall (Sociology), Peter Fritzsche (History), and Nick Grossman (Political Science). Peter Fritzsche argued that, instead of viewing the word “fascist” as a problem, many of the people who voted for Trump were attracted by the “strong leader” and so this charge of being fascist or dictatorial, counterintuitively, perhaps, was appealing to many voters. In an article published in The Forward, Fritzsche noted: “In his political campaigns in Germany in 1932 and 1933, Hitler repeatedly revealed himself to be, well, Hitler. He ran as the bigoted, hateful disrupter who stood unequivocally for change: the single leader who would speak up for Germans as the injured victims of a self-interested establishment; who would use any means available, including suspending the constitution, to restore virtue and peace; and who would make good on his promise to turn the page of Germany’s grim post-World War I history by using necessary violence.” It’s not hard to make the leap to the current moment.
The second What Now? on December 4th, featured Erik McDuffie (History and African American Studies), Toby Beauchamp (Gender and Women’s Studies), Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology), Ken Salo (Center for African Studies and Urban and Regional Planning), and Markian Dobczansky (Russian, East European and Eurasion Center). This panel offered an amazing array of information and analysis from the US and globally in order to try to understand the connections between the interlinked oppressions exerted by far-right governments and policies.
The final What Now? Which took place at BNAACC on April 7th, co-organized with the Center for the Study of Global Equity, focused on women and gender in the new era. Speakers Karen Flynn, Jessica Greenberg, Julie Pryde, and Lauren Aronson shared their various expertise to discuss these pressing questions. Karen Flynn, Endowed Professor of Nursing at UIC, who appeared remotely, spoke about the 92% and the justified need for rest among groups such as Black Women for Kamala Harris. She analyzed the widely distributed image of a group of Black women activists sipping cappuccinos as the world burned with a headline “enjoy your consequences.” Jessica Greenberg, Associate Professor of Anthropology, described how the rule of law and the values that upheld the rule of law have been upended. She pointed out that the idea of “peace and security,” is, in fact, an historical blip in the longer history of war and violence. Lauren Aronson, Clinical Professor of Law and an expert on immigration law, talked about her experiences advocating for immigrants who are afraid to apply for WIC subsidies because they are worried they will be deported, people who return home to find that their front doors have been knocked clear off their hinges, and fearing a return of ICE, must relocate, with little resources to do so. Julie Pryde, who has worked tirelessly as the Administrator of the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, picked up from Lauren’s narrative and described how CUPHD trains its staff in how to handle ICE. Julie described the cuts at the federal level (CDC, NIH, & FDA) and how those could impact much of public health including programs and services to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, immunizations, birth defect screening—much to the detriment of the local community! There were about forty-five people in the audience, a good balance of students, faculty, and community, and many of the questions led to rich and fascinating answers. We talked a lot about how none of us can fix the entire world, but we can each find a meaningful issue and plug into that to make change for the better! I am grateful to the speakers at this and all the What Now? Series, and to co-organizers Min Zhan, Director of the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity and Anita Kaiser, Associate Director CSGGE, big thanks to our co-sponsors Gisela Sin and the Illinois Global Institute, Jessica Greenberg and the EU Center, and Steve Witt and the Center for Global Studies.
This year, Yom HaShoah fell on the same day as the annual commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. Rabbi Gabe Miner presented a moving program "A Champion for Children: The Life and Legacy of Janusz Korczak,” which we co-sponsored.
Our final event of the year was a multi-pronged, also, as was Songs of Testimonies, logistically demanding and complex happening! But all the meetings, discussions, forms, review board approvals, and so on were so completely worth it to bring Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian’s iwitness project to UIUC. Ara Oshagan is a Los Angeles based artist and curator who has worked in multidisciplinary visual arts and culture. His skills range from photography, filmmaking, art-installations, to digital collage and print that speak to issues of genocide, violence, memory, trauma, and displacement. Born in the SWANA region, Oshagan is of Armenian descent and his artwork narrates the pain and dispossession of people across zones of conflict. Quoting from the 18th Street Arts Center website, his works have “...been reviewed and featured in the LA Times, LA Weekly, NPR’s Morning Edition, Hyperallergic, Artillery Mag, Virginia Quarterly Review among others. His work is in the permanent collection of the Craft Contemporary Museum, Southeast Museum of Photography, Downey Museum of Art, Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, and MOMA in Armenia.” Levon Parian studied photography at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He is currently on the faculty at Cal State Northridge where he was named, with Ara Oshagan and Vahagn Thomaisan, among the 100 leading global thinkers of 2015 for his work on the iWitness project.
The iWitness project allows us to see, up close, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. This took place 110 years ago, and the stories of the survivors are told via their faces, their words, their memories. At the Siebel Center for Design we hung ten- foot by ten-foot photofabrics. Initially, the fabrics were in the middle of the center, hanging down over glass railings; then, on April 21st, we hung several more around the glass encased Starlight room where Ara and Levon’s talk took place on April 24th. At the same time, and open from 10 April until 31 May, we installed a much more intimate exhibit at the Illini Union Gallery. We made a small library of books available to peruse in the gallery and invited visitors to take a resource guide with further reading about the Armenian genocide. Visitors were also encouraged to write their reflections in a series of small blue books placed in the gallery. This is just a brief, representative sample: “Thank you for sharing these retellings. I was unaware of the Armenian Genocide until now. The heartlessness is disturbing and disgusting. The individuals are so strong to have carried on in spite of their loss and grief.” “Thank you for sharing. Knowledge is power. Helps history to not repeat itself.” “There are so many events erased, events that you never learn about that have shaped the course of humanity. Forgetting is the perfect means for repeating things. Thanks for showing this and keeping alive the memory all the victims that suffered this.” Professor George Gasyna (Comparative and World Literature and Slavic) wrote: “Extraordinarily moving and absolutely heartbreaking.”
During the talk at the Siebel center, surrounded by the enormous images of survivors, translucent in the evening light, Ara and Levon discussed the origin of the iwitness project, shared images of the huge sculptural displays that they launched in Los Angeles (to which around 150,000 people went). They showed a photograph that included four generations of a family who traveled to LA to take a photograph with the image of their ancestor. The Starlight room was completely full, and many powerful connections were made between people who knew family members or had encountered the iwitness project before. Dance professor Serouj Aprahamian, for example, who had not met Ara and Levon until April 24th, shared that he had engaged with images from the iwitness project in a March for Humanity event. The following day, April 25th, we held the official opening at the Illini Union Art Gallery and many people gathered to see the images, read the stories, and hear more from Ara and Levon about their artistic process. After this, the Armenian Students Association treated us to dinner at MENA. Honestly this was one of the most moving experiences I have been engaged with: 25 students all shared their great-grandparents stories of loss and dispossession due to the Armenian genocide: some had left for Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, all kinds of stories handed down through the generations with everyone coming together in this little college town in Central Illinois to share connections. I am very grateful to Aren Hardy for organizing this and to the Salaam MENA center director, Awad Awad, for allowing the Armenian student group to use their lovely center to host this impactful dinner. Please read the wonderful article in Smile Politely that Ragini Chakraborty wrote about the exhibit and the iwitness event more broadly. The recording of the April 24th lecture is here.
This extraordinary two pronged, multiscalar exhibit and talk were more than a year in the making and involved a lot of coordination and a lot of wonderful humans pitching in to help! Enormous thanks to our sponsors: The Program in Jewish Culture and Society, the EU Center, HRI, Comparative and World Literature, CSAMES, REEEC, Center for Global Studies, SLCL, and CAS! Huge thank you to Ragini Chakraborty who both volunteered to write the first draft of the funding application and wrote an article for Smile Politely! Enormous thanks to Nicholas Puddicombe, Associate Director of Operations and Experience at Siebel, who has worked tirelessly to both strategize about and physically install these colossal and powerful photo fabrics. On the first installation day, Jarrett Newman, Lilia and Alex Yaralian helped Nick and I hang the fabrics. Jarrett also met with Ara and volunteered to help with the installation of the other exhibit at the Illini Union Art Gallery. James Frerichs, carpenter and installer extraordinaire, did a marvelous job installing the exhibit at the Illini Art Gallery (open until May 31st). Huge thanks to Tori Mays, Asako Kinase-Leggett, and J.B. Bailey at the Illini Art Gallery for choosing and supporting the exhibit. I also want to thank Helen Makhdoumian, former HGMS student and current postdoc at Vanderbilt, who has done more to foster this annual commemoration of the Armenian genocide than anyone else. It’s fitting that I can now announce that she will be next year’s speaker!
We look forward to a rich and rewarding year of thought-provoking programming ahead.
HGMS Events Coming up in 2025-2026
September 3 (to be confirmed) Ronnie Grinberg, author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, to offer the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and HGMS kick-off event, generously funded by the Goldberg lecture series
October 28th 5pm-6:30pm, Ayelet Tsabari, author of the award-winning novel, Songs for the Brokenherted. Alice Campbell Hall, thanks to generous support from the Einhorn family
November 6th, 4pm-5pm Anna Hunt (Professor of German) “Quick! Somebody Get Me A Doctor of German Philosophy,” HGMS workshop, English 109
January 27th 7pm Holocaust Remembrance Day screening of Lee. Location TBD
Lee Miller was an incredible photographer who was present at the liberation of some concentration camps. Trigger warning: some parts of this film display graphic images of survivors and victims of the Holocaust. I wrote a chapter about Lee Miller in Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory which Routledge put online to coordinate with the release of Lee
March 27th HGMS annual conference, 9a-5pm. Location TBD.
April 23th Annual Armenian Genocide Event Helen Makhdoumian (Postdoc, Vanderbilt University). Time and location TBD
