By Bear Smith, Reference Services Librarian Helene Mayer, Nazi Germany’s Jewish Olympian The 1936 Summer Olympics were, famously, held in Berlin while Germany was under Nazi rule. The Games had not been awarded to the Nazis, though. The International Olympic Committee had awarded the games to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler’s rise to chancellor and the eventual Nazi takeover of the country….
By Lauren Gilbert Director of Public Services, Center for Jewish History Death Masks at the Center for Jewish History Death masks, molded from plaster in the first hours after death before the features have stiffened or atrophied, were used for centuries to preserve the appearance of nobility and other eminent persons as models for posthumous sculptures or painted portraits. In the 19th century, these…
Struggling Against Tyranny: The Gertrude Goldhaber Collection “The vicious cycle which was originally created by the overt exclusion of women from mathematics and science must be broken… [I]t is of the utmost importance to give a girl at a very early age the conviction that girls are capable of becoming scientists.” Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber (1911-1998) was a German Jewish nuclear physicist who made several…
The NYPL Librarian Who Spied on the Nazis Florence Mendheim was a Jewish librarian for the New York Public Library, and in 1933 she went undercover to spy on Nazi-associated groups in the United States. Her collection, featuring a large amount of antisemitic propaganda, is held by the Leo Baeck Institute, and is an invaluable window into the spread of fascist propaganda in America…
by James Nadel, Communications Outreach Associate A month ago, the Center for Jewish History hosted “Echoes and Reflections,” a traveling program for educational professionals that focuses on Holocaust pedagogy. Echoes and Reflections was originally co-designed by three of the world’s most significant Jewish institutions: the Anti-Defamation League, Yad-Vashem (the Holocaust museum of Israel) and the USC Shoah Foundation. Since 2005, the program has traveled all over…
