History Events in Somerville

Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir by Professor Shulamit Reinharz, who was born in Amsterdam to German Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis and started her career at the University of Michigan. She joined the Sociology Department at Brandeis and later directed the Women's Studies Program. She created several research centers and is a founding editor of the Israeli-American academic journal, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish and Gender Studies. She received 'Best Book of the Year' for Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford).

Facing our own national and international crises, we will screen and discuss the film 'At Home in Utopia,' which looks at intergenerational Jewish radicalism from the last century. In confronting the trifecta of racism, fascism, and economic ruin, the Jewish cooperative housing movement launched in New York in the 1920s helped shape Jewish activism and influenced New York's approach to housing for the unionized working class. We'll explore the movement’s core values and strategies: What can young Jews committed to social justice and economic transformation learn from these earlier experiments, their success and failure, and the then-young people who committed their lives to this transformative endeavor?

The last remaining Holocaust survivors are dying off, but that doesn't mean their descendants have stopped wanting to learn about what happened to victimized family members. A major German archive still receives 20,000 'tracing inquiries' each year from relatives of death camp victims. David Gumpert initiated one such inquiry, seeking information about his grandmother, Clara Joseph, who perished in a Polish death camp. It came up empty, as did other inquiries, until he tried a different tack, and discovered a surprise: a collection of letters his grandmother wrote before she perished, that helped him get to know her as a person. He came up with similar items for other relatives. Before long he had a new understanding of his family in Germany during those awful years. Gumpert passes along his research techniques in this informative and inspiring class designed to help you 'get to know' long lost relatives.

Dr. Rovner will present a screening of Chelsea, The Jewish Years, an 18-minute documentary that she wrote, directed, and produced. The film traces the emergence, flourishing, and eventual decline of Chelsea’s Jewish community, illuminating the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped its history. Following the screening, participants will engage in a guided discussion exploring Chelsea as a gateway city and the broader implications of that designation; the role of personal narrative as a vital historical source; and the complex impact of assimilation on Jewish culture and communal life.