Library Channel (Video)

Carillonneur Scott Paulson plays the campus bells. Series: "UCSD at 50" [Arts and Music] [Show ID: 21052]

What paradoxes arise when victims of related persecution tell their stories next to, and after, each other? This question is at the heart of Ari Joskowicz’s highly acclaimed book “Rain of Ash,” which examines the unlikely entanglement of the histories of Jews and Romani people—the only two racialized groups the Nazis targeted for wholesale extermination. Joskowicz, professor of Jewish Studies at V...

In the early 20th century, Budapest was the second-largest Jewish city in Europe, and Jewish artists and intellectuals played a major role in the city’s cosmopolitan cultural life. Among them was theater and cinema director and producer Béla Pásztor, whose career was marked by early success and later oppression. In a conversation with UC San Diego history professor Deborah Hertz, Béla’s son, Rafae...

Everyone experiences mental chaos - when the mind is distracted, racing and anxious. But too much mental chaos can have negative impacts on our health and can limit our creativity. Jaime Pineda, professor emeritus of cognitive science at UC San Diego, has spent decades studying how the mind works. His new book “Controlling Mental Chaos: Harnessing the Power of the Creative Mind” focuses on the imp...

In late September 1941, tens of thousands of people were massacred over two days in a ravine known as Babyn Yar on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Kyiv. Most of the victims were Jews, though Roma, Crimean Tatars, and Ukrainian and Russian Communists were also among those murdered. In her 2017 book of poems, “The Voices of Babyn Yar,” award-winning poet Marianna Kiyanovska engages with this tragedy...

In this program presented by UC San Diego Library and UC San Diego History Department, hear and see the work of artists and scholars from Okinawa and Tokyo. The discussion centers around themes of nation, indigeneity, gender and militarism, with the end goal of proposing new ways of “living otherwise,” together through the power of art. Featured artists are Mayumo Inoue, associate professor of com...

What does it take to survive persecution and exile? The story of Greta Taussig and Rudy Gans offers answers to this tantalizing question. Born in Linz, Austria, Greta emigrated to London after the country’s incorporation into the Third Reich, eventually enduring the horrors of the Blitz. Rudy was able to make his way to Shanghai after imprisonment in the notorious Dachau concentration camp. Along...

On December 19, 1980, Shlomo Lewin, the former chairman of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, and his partner Frida Poeschke were shot dead in their house in Erlangen. Instead of pursuing the leads that led to the right-wing extremist group Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann, investigators concentrated on Lewin’s social environment for a long time. As part of UC San Diego's Holocaust Living History Workshop...

Jason Magabo Perez, San Diego's Poet Laureate, engages with UC San Diego's Erik Mitchell in a revealing conversation about his poetic journey and its impact on community and self-awareness. Perez shares readings from his work, which weaves together narratives of grief, identity, and resilience. His ability to articulate complex emotions and historical contexts through poetry provides a window into...

When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. In 2020, the archives were finally opened. Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents, Brown University Professor Emeritus David Kertzer’s book “The Pope at War” paints a dramatic portrait of what the Pope did and did not do as...

Between 1918 and 1921, Ukrainian peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution murdered over a 100,000 Jews. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. In his new book “In the Midst of Civilized Europe,” acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the fir...

UC San Diego Library’s Signature Event Series kicks off with a conversation with filmmaker and author Mason Engel. Engel talks about his current work, “Books Across America,” as well as his past films and his novel “2084.” The discussion is moderated by Audrey Geisel University Librarian Erik T. Mitchell. Series: "Writers" [Humanities] [Show ID: 39321]

Among the most striking exhibits at the Auschwitz museum are undoubtedly the mountains of loot stolen from Jews murdered upon arrival. Shoes, suitcases, spectacles, and more fill entire rooms in the former barracks of the main camp. Surviving the Shoah when their owners did not, they constitute a potent proof of the Nazis’ abiding concern with material gain. In this talk, author and historian Pete...

The China beat is one of the toughest in journalism and one of the most important. How the U.S. media has covered the country has profoundly influenced American government policy and shaped public opinion in the U.S. and around the world. Journalist Mike Chinoy, author of the new book "Assignment China," and a former CNN Beijing Bureau Chief, talks about the experience reporting in China. His book...

What's the future look like with a changing climate? And who will lead the way to help us mitigate the environmental, economic and social impacts? In this program, internationally acclaimed author Kim Stanley Robinson talks about what motivates him to write science fiction that focuses on the environment. Robinson is author of more than 20 books, including "The Ministers for the Future," the "Mars...

Twentieth-century fascism was a political ideology encompassing totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany’s case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Historians of the Holocaust tend to reject the notion of fascism as a causal explanation for its origins. Conversely, scholars of fascism present the Shoah as a particular event that is not centr...

As part of the UC San Diego Libarary Author Talk Series, class of '76 alumnus and bestselling author Rex Pickett talks about his most recent novel, “The Archivist,” a murder mystery that takes a deep dive into the archiving world set in a fictional Geisel Library. Joining Pickett in the discussion are Brian Schottlaender, UCSD University Librarian Emeritus, Caryn Radick, Digital Archivist, Rutgers...

How does the concept of space enhance our understanding of the Holocaust? In this talk, British historian Tim Cole tells the story of the Shoah through an exploration of landscapes victims moved—and were moved—through across Europe. His exploration of the “Holocaust landscapes” shines a powerful light on the geographic dimensions of the Shoah. Series: "Library Channel" [Humanities] [Show ID: 37452...

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. Renamed Israel by the Nazis, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. In exile, he fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen...

When the Second World War came to an end, Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, lay in ruins. Few contemporaries, if any, could have anticipated that 70 years later, Berlin would boast large diaspora communities of Palestinians and Israelis who have made a home among Germans. In “The Moral Triangle,” Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Pa...

Helen Epstein, a prolific journalist and author, discusses her mother's memoir about her life in Nazi-occupied Europe. "Franci's War" starts in 1942 when 22-year-old Franci Rabinek began a three-year journey that would take her from Terezin, the Nazis’ “model ghetto,” to the Czech family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, slave labor camps in Hamburg, and finally Bergen Belsen. Trained as a dress designe...

Joel Dimsdale discusses his latest book “Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media,” which traces the evolution of brainwashing from its beginnings in torture and religious conversion into the age of neuroscience and social media. Dimsdale is distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego. Series: "Writers" [Health and Medicine] [Human...

Who was Josef Mengele? After the end of the Holocaust, the German physician has been increasingly viewed as the personification of supreme evil both in the minds of survivors and the public at large. In this lecture based on his highly acclaimed book “Mengele,” David Marwell untangles history and myth surrounding the man known variously as the Angel of Death and the good uncle, suggesting that Men...

What is everyday life, and how is it experienced under extreme stress? This is the broader question that animates the research of Anna Hájková, an associate professor of Modern Continental European History at the University of Warwick. In her talk, Hájková examines sex work, sexual violence, and coercion of Jewish women and men in concentration camps, ghettos, and in hiding. She is the author of m...

At the height of World War II, a team of Soviet scholars embarked on an ambitious goal to collect recently written songs dealing with the Holocaust. Lost until the early 1990's, these songs were rediscovered and recorded with an ensemble of recognized soloists. Thanks to the painstaking labor of Anna Shternshis and the talent of Psoy Korolenko, audiences worldwide can now enjoy and reflect upon th...