Ithaca Descendants of Holocaust Survivors, a local community group, is honored to be hosting historian Judith Cohen here at Ithaca College on March 25th. Ms. Cohen is visiting Ithaca from Washington D.C. where she serves as the Chief Acquisitions Curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC
Ms. Cohen will be leading a multimedia presentation called “Jewish Ghetto Photography” which will take place in Textor Hall room 101. The vast majority of, and most widely known, Holocaust photography was taken by German photographers. These photos include such iconic images as the Warsaw ghetto boy and the selections at Auschwitz. We, therefore, in large part, visually imagine the Holocaust through Nazi eyes. However, there also exists a considerable corpus of Jewish ghetto photography taken both by professional and amateur photographers. These photographs not only capture aspects of the ghetto hidden to the Germans but also show layers of ambiguity and nuance that the official photos miss. Cohen's presentation will explore questions such as, "how these photographs differ from the better-known Nazi photographs" and "does it matter who took the photo or just what appears in the image". This presentation is hosted by Ithaca College Jewish Studies and Ithaca College Hillel. This program is free and open to the public.