Film screening at Edlavitch DCJCC at 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC
Nathan Hilu, the son of Syrian Jewish immigrants to New York, received a life-changing assignment from the U.S. Army: to guard the top Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
Filmmaker Elan Golod proposes a documentary portrait of the aging artist but what begins as a peek at a unique witness to history grows into an absorbing study of the function of art as archive and invention. Daring to question an artist’s stories, Nathan-ism is a fascinating look at one man’s need to share truths with a world that doesn’t always want to listen.
This must-see documentary for all fine arts lovers made the International Documentary Association Shortlist for Best Documentaries in 2023.
2:00 pm: Webinar: American Jews in North Africa in World War II
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm May 16, 2024
Françoise S. Ouzan, author of True to My God and Country: How Jewish Americans Fought in World War II discusses American Jews who served in Operation Torch in North Africa including their interaction with the local Jewish population in Algeria and Morocco.
7:00 pm: Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America with Mark Zaid and Rafael Medoff
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm June 4, 2024
The nonfiction graphic novel, Whistleblowers is the true story of four courageous individuals who risked their careers—or their lives—to confront the unfolding Holocaust.Who were the whistleblowers?
Alan Cranston—a young journalist and future U.S. senator who exposed the truth of Hitler’s plans.
Henry Morgenthau, Jr.—a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet who confronted the President over the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler
Jan Karski—an eyewitness to Nazi atrocities who met with American and British officials to alert them about the death camps.
Josiah E. DuBois Jr.—an American civil servant who blew the whistle on colleagues inside the Roosevelt administration who were blocking the rescue of refugees.
Acclaimed author Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and award-winning comics creator Dean Motter bring to life these tales of moral courage in the face of genocide.
3:00 pm: Webinar - Alfred Dreyfus: The Man Behind the Affair
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm June 25, 2024
Maurice Samuels joins us to discuss his new book: Alfred Dreyfus: The Man Behind the Affair. Samuels tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.
7:00 pm: Virtual Film Screening - A Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm July 11, 2024
Film screening followed by discussion with Audrey Glickman, a survivor of the shooting. On Saturday, October 27th, 2018, a white supremacist, further radicalized by the political climate at the time, walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue with four semi-automatic assault weapons, shouting “all Jews must die.” He murdered eleven congregants, ranging in age from 54 to 97, as they prayed. A TREE OF LIFE: THE PITTSBURGH SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING creates a deeply personal, trauma-informed portrait of the survivors, victims, and victims' family members of the Pittsburgh Synagogue attack, and brings into sharp focus the hate-based crisis that threatens our collective safety and the very social fabric of our society. As the first film to document the survivor’s stories and the only documentary with this level of personal access to the survivors and families of the victims, viewers will experience first-hand how the lives of those directly affected have profoundly changed and how the Pittsburgh community and the congregations set out on a path towards healing.
3:00 pm: Webinar: I Will Tell No War Stories with Howard Mansfield
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm July 18, 2024
Howard Mansfield discusses the new book I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II in conversation with Scott Mansfield. When Howard Mansfield grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of his father, Pincus Mansfield’s time as a tail gunner on B-24 bombers. Like most of his generation, it was a rule not to talk about what he’d experienced in war. “You’re not getting any war stories from me,” he’d say. Cleaning up the old family house the year before his father's death, Mansfield was surprised to find a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. Mansfield began to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history he thought he knew. I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in a family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?