Join the JHGC, Classrooms without Borders and Ghetto Fighters’ House for a post film discussion on the NEW documentary Resistance: They Fought Back
Join us for this event as we unveil tales of resilience and courage, remembering and reflecting on the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity.
The Film link will be delivered to registrants 3 days before our engaging post-film discussion
“People have this myth stuck in their heads that Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter. But this is where the real story begins… Jews did not go as sheep to the slaughter… They fought back.” Professor Richard Freund
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
We were taught that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter.
We were taught a Nazi lie.
The discussion will feature: Paula S. Apsell – Executive Producer, Co-Director
For 33 years, Paula Apsell was the senior executive producer of the PBS NOVA science series. Prior to that, she produced and directed a dozen NOVA episodes, and was a Fellow in the Public Understanding of Science at MIT. During her long tenure at NOVA, Paula was responsible for supervising more than 600 documentaries on a wide variety of subjects in the sciences, and one, The Bible’s Buried Secrets, an exploration of the archaeology of the Hebrew Bible, with partial funding provided by the Righteous Persons Foundation. She also co-directed and executive produced one of the most watched NOVA episodes, Holocaust Escape Tunnel. During her tenure, NOVA won every major broadcasting award, including the Emmy, the Peabody, the duPont-Columbia University Gold and Silver Batons, and an Academy Award nomination for Special Effects. In 2018 she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Emmy of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Facilitated by Dr. Michael Berenbaum
Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.
He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.
Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Centre and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Register here