New Perspectives on Music and the Holocaust

Panel Discussion Produced by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum Co-sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free

This roundtable will feature four accomplished early career scholars whose research sheds new light on music and the Holocaust. Dr. Mackenzie Pierce will present main themes and methodological implications of his forthcoming monography, Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust. Dr. Nicolette van den Bogerd will focus on how Szymon Laks, a Polish Jewish composer and survivor of Auschwitz, addressed Holocaust memory politics in Poland during the early 1960s from his home in Paris. Dr. Jules Riegel will examine how and why musical performance in the Warsaw Ghetto took on serious political purpose, with a focus on how music and its aesthetics became part of a struggle to assert Jewish belonging in the European cultural canon, even amidst genocide. Dr. Tara Jordan uses "historical-grounded imagining" as a method for understanding the Jewish community of Monastir in the years leading up to the Holocaust, with a focus on the community's 1932 Purim processesion. This conversation will be moderated by Dr. Bret Werb of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.