NorthWest Arkansas Community College

How do we make sense of conspiracy theories focused on control of societal institutions by Jewish elites in today's social media saturated and post-truth world? What role did these conspiracy theories play in the Holocaust and within Fascist movements in the Western world? What history do these conspiracies have within mass media? How do they gain salience within different aspects of the population? How do they build on past repertoires of symbols and myths? What are some of the major organizations and individual promoting these conspiracies? How can we confront these conspiracies and speak truthfully to a world of anti-truth? Dr. Ryan Michael Neville-Shepard, Associate Professor of Communication and the Graduate Director for the MA program at the University of Arkansas, addresses these questions by translating the confounding and the confusing into a rational and scholarly framework. He helps us calmly weigh what is a stake with these conspiracy theories for what we hope to see within our marketplace of ideas, American politics, and truth. 

This event is a part of the Spring Arts and Culture Festival. 

Guest speaker Jennifer Hoyer led an interactive lecture on November 13th, 2023 on the history of the Holocaust, the conditions that made it possible, and its continued impact. Learn how individuals and families were affected and other issues, that frequently escape our gaze, bear the legacy of the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

This event was part of International Education Week. 

Speaker Bio: Dr. Jennifer Hoyer joined the University of Arkansas German section in fall of 2007, and founded the U of A Jewish Studies program in 2015 and is the current program director. Jewish Studies recently piloted a course entitled "How did the Holocaust affect...?" with an online archive you can explore. Hoyer also teaches courses in poetry, cinema, medieval and early modern literature, modernism and Holocaust writing. 

Currently, Hoyer's research focuses on neurodivergence and intersections of European lyric poetry with mathematics since the 17th century. It combines Walker's theory of "neuroqueering" with the concepts of "the queer art of failure" (Halberstam), "queer phenomenology" (Ahmed), and "affirmative sabotage" (Spivak) to consider what mathematics become in the hands of European lyric poets since the 17th century. The impulse is to explore why we are encouraged to value the one and not the other, why these fields are often understood as antagonistic (when they share essential attributes), and how the intersections provide opportunities to dismantle epistemologies of the global north. Previous research projects focused on poet Nelly Sachs, German Jewish writers and playwright Silke Hassler.

Montgomery College Professor Emeritus Dr. Myrna Goldenberg discussed the role of Jewish women during the Holocaust on Oct. 11, 2022 with NWACC students through a Zoom presentation.

As a subject, women and the Holocaust is a rich source of information about the experiences of Jews in Europe from 1933 and 1945, the span of the Nazi regime. However, in the decades following World War II, there was little information specifically about women.

The particularities about their lives and deaths was nearly unknown until the early 1980s when feminist historians of German history, some of whom were children of Holocaust survivors, delved into that history. Their interest may have begun from curiosity about their personal history, but it sparked a rich subtopic that expanded into the study of literature, sociology, the arts, psychology, philosophy and, of course, the history of that period.

Since then, scholars have been exploring the similarities and differences in the experiences of both men and women, some of which were based on gender-based socialization of the early twentieth century and some of which were the function of biology. Dr. Myrna Goldenberg will discuss some of those findings and their significance, specifically in the context of genocide.

Goldenberg, PhD, has published seminal articles on women and the Holocaust and co-edited with Amy Shapiro, "Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust", with Elizabeth Baer, "Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust", and with Rochelle L. Millen, "Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities", as well as numerous articles on American Jewish women’s literature and history.

Her prize-wining book, "Before All Memory is Lost", is composed of short memoirs of east European women who survived and emigrated to Canada. She is considering organizing her many articles into a Holocaust reader focused on the lives of Jewish women.

NWACC Social and Behavioral Sciences hosted an inaugural lecture in the NWACC Holocaust Knowledge Awareness Project lecture series. The live-streamed lecture and discussion took place on November 17th from 12 PM - 1:15 PM via Zoom.

Dr. Erika Briesacher, Associate Professor of History at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, presented her research on the economics and history of Holocaust perpetrators. Her talk was titled, Threads of History: Memory, Society, and the Holocaust.

Theaters of Humiliation: A European History of Antisemitism - Wednesday, March 3, 2021,10:30 a.m - 11:45 a.m. on Zoom

This moderated online synchronous discussion with Dr. T. Fielder Valone, Dr. Katherine White, Dr. Sevin Gallo examined how Jewish families and individuals were humiliated by their neighbors in town squares and public spaces across the Third Reich before they were murdered, addressing the following questions:

• What messages and motifs did such publicly performed acts of denigration communicate, both to Jewish and non-Jewish onlookers?
• Why did the violence target religious symbols in some cases and political imagery in others?
• How deep did the pool of hatred go, how widely did it run, who drank from its banks?
• How did local populations living in Central and Eastern Europe under Nazi rule make use of anti-Jewish violence?

In partnership with The Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (UHMM), Northwest Arkansas Holocaust Awareness Project (NAHAP), and the NWACC Spring Arts and Culture Festival, Dr. Fielder Valone discussed these issues with Dr. Katherine White, Program Officer for Education Outreach at USHMM, and Dr. Sevin Gallo, NWACC World History Professor and Global Studies Coordinator.

Dr. T. Fielder Valone holds a PhD in History from Indiana University. He has published and spoken publicly on a wide range of topics, including the German minority in western Poland during World War Two, Jewish slave labor on the Baltic coast, the Holocaust by bullets in Eastern Europe, and humiliation rituals in rural Lithuania.

Dr. T. Fielder Valone has published a number of articles and book chapters in different venues, including Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2014), Beyond Ordinary Men: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography (2019), and Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War Two and the Holocaust (2019), among others. His research has been supported by Fulbright, the Saul Kagan Fellows Program, and other institutions. Dr. Valone was awarded the 2019-2020 Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Invitational Scholar for the Study of Antisemitism fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum for his research project, “Prelude to Mass Murder: Anti-Jewish Ritual Violence in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Lithuania, 1933-1941.”

October 4 at 6 pm

Explaining the Holocaust: A Book Discussion

Are you interested in learning about the Holocaust and understanding how such a massive tragedy could take place in the twentieth century?

Join in reading the book, "Why? Explaining the Holocaust", by Peter Hayes, one of the premier works on the genocide and take part in an interactive conversation with historical experts. The discussion will take place through Zoom on October 4th at 6 PM, and will be moderated by the Northwest Arkansas Holocaust Awareness Project (NAHAP) and hosted by the Arkansas Humanities Council (AHC).

The first twenty individuals to register for this event will receive a FREE copy of the book and all registered attendees will receive a summary of the book via email to follow along with during the discussion.

Register: https://arkansashumanitiescouncil.org/event/explaining-the-holocaust-a-book-discussion/

Interview with a Holocaust Survivor

March 9th from 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM

This event is in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum and Northwest Arkansas Holocaust Awareness Project.

Join us virtually for an interview between a United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum staff member and a Holocaust survivor followed by a time for questions and comments from the audience.

Interdependence was and is a key both to those who survived the Holocaust and to those of us who bear the responsibility to learn from and avoid another such tragedy. Those who perpetrated the Holocaust did so with the explicit and implicit cooperation of many others. Each of us has a responsibility to ensure that no group in society, whether ethnic, religious or political (or any other category) is marginalized, scapegoated, or persecuted by those in power​.

The event will be live streamed on Zoom and projected in NWACC's White Auditorium. Zoom link will be available closer to the event.