The Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program Programming and Partnership includes:
- Collaboration with Hillel@FIU to host the FIU Annual Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week
- Partnership with the Jewish-Museum of Florida-FIU and The Wolfsonian–FIU
- The annual Fishman Holocaust Studies Scholar-in-Residence
- Partnership with the College of Arts, Sciences and Education and Miami Dade College for Teaching the Holocaust
- Access to University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive and Yale University’s Fortunoff Visual Archive for Holocaust Testimonies databases and resources.
- Annual Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week
The program collaborates with Hillel@FIU to host the FIU Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week – an entire week of programming dedicated to honoring the memory of victims of genocide across the world. One of the hallmark events of the week, the FIU Annual Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony has featured President Mark B. Rosenberg along with survivors who reflect on the importance of standing up for justice and honoring the memory of those who lost their lives during dark moments in history. Partners for this week of events include academic units at the university, student organizations and non-profit organizations across the country.
- Jewish Museum of Florida - FIU
Through its partnership with the Jewish-Museum of Florida-FIU, the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program allows students and community members to interact and engage with art exhibits, film screenings, concerts and workshops while exploring history.
JMOF-FIU is the only museum dedicated to telling the story of more than 250 years of Florida Jewish history, arts and culture, with a growing collection of more than 100,000 items. The museum is housed in two restored historic buildings that were once synagogues for Miami Beach's first Jewish congregation. JMOF-FIU presents a vibrant schedule of thought-provoking history and art exhibits that change periodically, paired with a dynamic array of programs.
- The Wolfsonian - FIU
Through its collaboration with The Wolfsonian–FIU, the program provides access to numerous historical artifacts that allow students to analyze the messages and cultural atmosphere that led to and propagated the Holocaust. The Wolfsonian has substantial holdings of materials documenting the National Socialists’ rise to power and their rule in Germany through the Second World War. Books, magazines, posters and other printed materials, as well as fine and decorative art from the Third Reich demonstrate how the Nazis used propaganda to promote their policies, including the demonization of non-Aryan peoples. Rare items in the Wolfsonian library include children’s books designed to inculcate fear and hatred of Jewish people as a necessary preparation for and precursor to the Holocaust.
- Fishman Scholar
The Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program hosts the annual Fishman Holocaust Studies Scholar-in-Residence, which is supported by Dr. Lawrence M. Fishman and his wife Suzanne R. Fishman’s $100,000 gift to expand Holocaust education and outreach. The scholar-in-residence lectures about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust at FIU, the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (JMOF) and at local high schools to raise awareness among the youth.
2019 – Sara R. Horowitz
- Friday, Feb. 8: “What We Learn, At Last: Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence and Sexuality in Deferred Holocaust Autobiographies and Testimonies,” MMC
- Sunday, Feb. 10: “Holocaust Shadows on the City of Lights,” JMOF
- Monday, Feb. 11: “Mothers and Daughters in the Shoah,” KYHS
Sara R. Horowitz is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities and former Director of the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, which received the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, and served the senior founding editor of the Azrieli Series of Holocaust Memoirs—Canada (Series 1 and 2). She is the editor of Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Volume X: Back to the Sources (2012), and co-editor of Hans Günther Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (2016) which received the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and of Encounter with Appelfeld, and other books. In addition, she is founding co-editor of the journal KEREM: A Journal of Creative Explorations in Judaism. She served as editor for Literature for The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, ed. Judith Baskin. She publishes extensively on contemporary Holocaust literature, gender and Holocaust memory survivors, and Jewish North American fiction. She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, sits on the Academic Advisory Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Academic Advisory Council of the Holocaust Education Foundation. Currently, she is completing a book called “Gender, Genocide, and Jewish Memory” and another entitled “Jewish Shadows on the City of Lights.”
What We Learn, At Last: Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence and Sexuality in Deferred Holocaust Autobiographies and Testimonies (MMC)
Deferred and belated memory narratives of the Shoah enrich and complicate our understanding of how people experienced, contended with, and recollected their experiences in the Nazi genocide. The stories survivors eventually tell—publicly, privately, cryptically or directly—sometimes contain revelations about delicate and sensitive issues that survivors did not feel free to share earlier. Particularly for women who were children or teenagers during the Shoah—but also for some men—topics such as sexual barter, sexual experimentation, and sexual abuse emerge. Their stories disturb us and challenge us as listeners. How do survivors give shape to narratives of sexual encounters? In thinking about these difficult narratives, Dr. Horowitz complicated such categories as abuse, agency, coercion, and consent, and examined first-hand accounts about sexuality as attempts to engage, deflect, shape and resist interpretation and judgment.
Holocaust Shadows on the City of Lights (JMOF)
Between the two World Wars, Paris was a magnet for eastern European Jews fleeing oppression and attracted by its promise of equality. But these “foreign Jews”—immigrants and their children—were the most vulnerable during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the ensuing round-ups and deportations. After World War II, the public conversation about the evils of the war rarely acknowledged Jewish victimization. Post-war Jewish writing—by both native Parisians and war refugees—walks their readers through the city’s streets and neighborhoods. In their writing, the cityscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them. Dr. Horowitz shared her latest research on Jewish refugees and residents of Paris—including those who survived in hiding—writing in and about the city of lights immediately after World War II, exploring themes of absence, mourning, home and displacement in the aftermath of the Shoah.
Mothers and Daughters in the Shoah (KYHS)
The Shoah created circumstances that had a powerful impact on women in their roles as mothers and as daughters. In a wide-ranging and interactive discussion with KYHS seniors, Dr. Horowitz took a close look at some of the implications, as described through memoirs and testimonies from women about their experiences before, during, and after the war. Based on testimonies she has personally collected or read, Dr. Horowitz raised a series of challenging issues specific to the mother-daughter relationship and responded to a series of probing and thoughtful questions from students.
- Teaching The Holocaust
In partnership with the College of Arts, Sciences and Education and Miami Dade College, the program organizes trainings for education students preparing to enter the workforce. These workshops allow students to explore teaching methods, best practices and resources available to them that will help equip them to lead conversations and discuss course material on the Holocaust.
- Resources
The University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive and Yale University’s Fortunoff Visual Archive for Holocaust Testimonies – the leading digitized databases featuring first-person testimonies of Holocaust and genocide survivors around the world – are both accessible to all registered users of FIU’s Dorothea Green Library.
To raise awareness about these two resources and help enhance curricular integration of first-person testimonies the program, the program hosts annual interdisciplinary faculty workshops on these archives, in collaboration with the Green Library.