In the last years of the 20th century, Hollywood was big on causes.
But in the 1930s, American cinema was virtually silent on one of history’s most urgent moral issues: The rising persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.
This silence was especially curious because the era’s most powerful movie moguls were Jews, who themselves had fled Russian pogroms a generation earlier.
Brandeis University Professor Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, will delve deeper into this complex story with a panel of experts at Drew University in Madison on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2014.
The daylong conference, Hollywood and Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, Stories Told/Stories Untold, is presented by the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study, for its annual remembrance of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
“We will explore how Hollywood’s interface with the socio-political context of the time fostered the creation of films that told only a limited story about the evolving repressive and genocidal Nazi regime,” Center Director Ann Saltzman said in a statement.
Other panelists include:
- Joshua Kavaloski, associate professor of German at Drew and assistant director of the center, whose talk is titled Stories We Tell: Narrative and the Politics of Memory.
- Larry Greene, professor of history at Seton Hall University, speaking on Racism, Xenophobia, and Anti-Semitism in America: The Interwar Years.
- Susan Carruthers, professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark, covering Hollywood and Hitler, 1939–1945.
The conference runs from 9 am to 3 pm at the university’s Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, and will conclude with a panel discussion by all the presenters.
Reservations are required; the cost is $20. For more details contact the Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study at 973-408-3600 or send an email. The campus is at 36 Madison Ave. Light refreshments will be served at 8:30 am.
