Meet Dr. Ruth Westheimer and join her birthday celebration! Born as Karola Ruth Siegel on June 4, 1928, in Frankfurt, Germany, she grew up as the only child in a privileged Orthodox Jewish family. However, her carefree childhood was violently shattered shortly after Kristallnacht when the SS came to take away her father. In 1939, she was sent on a Kindertransport to Switzerland, where she lived in an orphanage until 1945. She then emigrated to pre-state Israel, became known as Ruth Siegel (dropping the German-sounding Karola) and became a sniper and scout for the Haganah.
Past Events › Book Talk
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The Catcher Was a Spy — The Moe Berg Story
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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Morris “Moe” Berg was a Jewish American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball, who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Berg spoke numerous languages and read ten newspapers a day. His reputation as an intellectual was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz show Information Please. Berg was sent by the US government to determine whether the German physicist Werner Heisenberg was developing an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany, and Berg was authorized to shoot Heisenberg if he had definitive proof in the affirmative. Meet Nicholas Dawidoff, author of the best-selling book on which the motion picture was based. He will be in conversation with the well-known journalist and podcaster Jacob Goldstein. (more…)
free but registration required
Miep Gies and the Rescue of Anne Frank’s Diary
11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK • 7 PM LONDON
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This program pays tribute to the woman who sheltered Anne Frank for three years and then rescued her now-famous diary. Miep Gies oversaw the “secret annex” where the Frank family was housed, while sheltering another Jewish person in her own home. Meet Gillian Walnes Perry who knew Miep Gies well and accompanied her to the Academy Awards and Meeg Pincus who wrote a delightful book on Miep Gies for young people. (more…)
free but registration required
Fleeing Mussolini — Italian-Jewish Refugees in the United States
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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This program is about the exile of Italian Jews to America. Fleeing Mussolini’s racial laws, roughly two thousand Italian Jews landed in America in the 1930s and 40s. They didn’t fit in with either the Italian-American community or the Jewish-American community, yet many Italian Jewish refugees became leaders in their professions and productive contributors to American life.
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The Lost Book of Moses
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible, tells the story of the oldest Bible in the world, how its outing as a fraud led to a scandalous death, and why archaeologists now believe it was real — if only they could find it. At once historical drama and modern-day investigation, the book simultaneously explores the 19th-century disappearance of a controversial Bible and the author’s hunt for the manuscript across eight countries and four continents.
Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose Anti-Nazi Resistance Movement
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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Sophie Scholl was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, co-founder of the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-Nazi leaflets throughout Germany with her brother, Hans Scholl. They dropped hundreds of these leaflets from a high gallery at the University of Munich down on crowds of students milling about below — arguably the only full-fledged public protest against Nazism to have occurred. Meet Holocaust historian and anthropologist Dr. Jud Newborn, the world’s leading authority on Hans and Sophie Scholl, who will inspire you and motivate you to speak truth to power. (more…)
free program; registration required
The Border of Truth
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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Like so many children of survivors and refugees, author Victoria Redel grew up in the shadows of her parents’ different escapes from war. For a writer, such ambiguity is rich soil. Redel’s father left Europe with a visa authorized by the Holocaust rescuer Aristides de Sousa Mendes. From Lisbon he embarked on the Portuguese ship the Quanza and was among the 86 passengers retained on the ship in New York and then in Mexico to be sent back to Lisbon and then presumably to be repatriated into Nazi-occupied Belgium. The ship, after refueling with coal in Virginia, was saved by the remarkable efforts of Eleanor Roosevelt in outsmarting Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The Border of Truth is a fictionalized account of this dramatic story. (more…)
free program; registration required
“We are all Jews here” — The Story of Roddie Edmonds
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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Footsteps of My Father, an award-winning film produced by the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, presents the extraordinary story of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, the only American soldier recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
free program; registration required
Shalom China
1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK
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China has a long and storied Jewish history dating back to at least the eighth century. The Jews of Kaifeng, who disappeared through assimilation and intermarriage, are undergoing a resurgence with their descendants reclaiming their lost identities. There were also substantial communities, now lost, in Harbin and Shanghai. Many Austrian Jews also came to Shanghai seeking refuge from Nazi-occupied Europe, rescued by the Holocaust hero Feng Shan Ho, the “angel of Vienna.” Today, the Jewish population in China is approximately 2,500 people. Image: Page with names in Hebrew and Chinese from a Kaifeng Jewish prayer book, collection of the Klau Library in Cincinnati.
free program; registration required
Daughters of the Inquisition — Retracing Long-Lost Jewish Roots
11 AM LOS ANGELES • 2 PM NEW YORK
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This program features the breathtaking stories and genealogical sleuthwork of Doreen Carvajal and Genie Milgrom, who succeeded in reaching back centuries to find their Jewish ancestors in pre-Inquisition Spain and Portugal. (more…)