WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2022: Exhibition Spotlight: Anne Frank (Part 1)

Video recording of Exhibition Spotlight (Part 1)

The University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums explores current exhibition Let Me Be Myself: The Life Story of Anne Frank through the Exhibition Spotlight program series in a special two-part virtual panel event. Pentacrest Museums Director of Education & Engagement, Carolina Kaufman will moderate discussion with panelists on a variety of related topics to share the story and legacy of Anne Frank and her impact on society.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2022: WorldCanvass: Teaching Anne Frank

Time: 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. CST

Venue: MERGE, 136 S. Dubuque Street, Iowa City

Part 1: Anne Frank and Public History / 5:30 - 6:00 p.m.

• Ronald Leopold, director, Anne Frank House, Amsterdam
• Doyle Stevick, executive director, Anne Frank Center, University of South Carolina
• Kirsten Kumpf Baele, lecturer and outreach coordinator, Department of German, University of Iowa

Part 2: Teaching Anne Frank / 6:00 - 6:30 p.m.

• Elizabeth Heineman, professor, Departments of History and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, University of Iowa
• Maia Sheppard, assistant professor, College of Education, University of Iowa
• Meghan Maleri, BA business (expected May '23), University of Iowa

Part 3: Anne Frank in History and Human Rights Issues Today / 6:30 - 7:00 p.m.

• Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz, Agudas Achim Congregation, Iowa City
• Stephanie Moris, director, Refugee Alliance of Central Iowa
• Wilhelm Schwendemann, dean and professor, Department of Theological Education and Diaconal Studies, EH University, Freiburg, and director, FIM-Freiburg Institute of Human Rights Pedagogy

TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 2022: Panel Discussions and Film Screening

Panel Discussions / 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. CST

Venue: 1117 University Capitol Centre (in-person)

Opening Remarks / 9:00 - 9:15 a.m.

Waltraud Maierhofer, professor, Department of German; professor, Global Health Studies, University of Iowa. Forum co-organizer.

Panel 1: The Holocaust in Global Context / 9:15 - 10:45 a.m.

• Elizabeth Heineman, professor, History and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, University of Iowa
  • A Jewish Story or a Universal Story?

• Stephen Gaies, professor emeritus and director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education, University of Northern Iowa
  • Odysseys of Survival: The Deportation of Polish Jews to the Soviet Interior

• Gisela Argote, PhD student, History, University of Iowa
  • Nocturnal Silence: The Jewish Migration to Mexico during Nazi Germany

Moderator: Elke Heckner, lecturer, Department of German, University of Iowa

Panel 2: Holocaust Education / 11:00 - 12:30 p.m.

• Deborah Michaels, associate professor, Education, Grinnell College
  • Current Challenges to Teaching About the Holocaust: Snapshots from Iowa Secondary-School Classrooms

• Wilhelm Schwendemann, dean and professor, Department of Theological Education and Diaconal Studies, EH University, Freiburg, and director, FIM-Freiburg Institute of Human Rights Pedagogy
  • Prevention of Antisemitism and Racism as a Learning Outcome: Remembrance and Memory in German School Curricula

• Doyle Stevick, executive director, Anne Frank Center; associate professor, Educational Leadership and Policies, University of South Carolina
  • Education Against Auschwitz

Moderator: Maia Sheppard, assistant professor, College of Education, University of Iowa

Panel 3: Symbols, Icons, and Museums / 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.

• Oren Baruch Stier, director, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program; professor, Religious Studies, Florida International University
  • The Virtual Anne Frank

• Janet Hesler, historian, and curator
  • Danville Station Museum: Anne Frank Connection

• Kimberly Datchuk, curator of Learning & Engagement, Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa
  • Faculty and curator partnerships: teaching beyond the classroom

Moderator: Waltraud Maierhofer, professor, Department of German; professor, Global Health Studies, University of Iowa

Panel 4: Compassionate Activism / 3:45 - 5:15 p.m.

• Naomi Yavneh-Klos, Reverend Emmett M. Bienvenu, SJ, Distinguished Chair in Humanities; professor and co-chair, Languages and Cultures, Loyola University
  • Zooming with Anne Frank: Moving from Empathy to Compassion in a Global Pandemic

• Volker Beck, publicist and lecturer, Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University
  Nicola Brauch, chair, History Education, Ruhr University
  Marc Grimm, senior researcher, Centre for Prevention and Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence, Bielefeld University
  Sarah Jahn, lecturer, University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration, North Rhine-Westphalia
  • EMPATHIA: Introducing an interdisciplinary project on joint empowerment of future police officers and (history) teachers against antisemitism

• Kirsten Kumpf Baele, lecturer and outreach coordinator, Department of German, University of Iowa
  Sofie Decock, associate professor, Applied Linguistics, Ghent University
  Marisa Rethman, B.A. German, Accounting (expected May '22), and Iowa Center for Research Undergraduates (ICRU) Fellow
  • Remembering and Sharing Difficult (Hi)stories: Embodied Pedagogy in the University Classroom

Moderators: Lia Plakans, departmental executive officer, Teaching and Learning; professor, Foreign Language and ESL Education, University of Iowa
Will Coghill-Behrends, co-director, Linda R. Baker Teacher Leader Center; clinical associate professor, Teaching and Learning

Closing Remarks / 5:15 p.m.

Kirsten Kumpf Baele, lecturer and outreach coordinator, Department of German, University of Iowa. Forum co-organizer.

Film Screening: In Line For Anne Frank

Time: 7:00 - 8:30 p.m. CST

Venue: FilmScene at the Chauncey, 404 E. College Street, Iowa City

Join us for a special film screening of In Line For Anne Frank followed by a conversation with Ronald Leopold, director of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. Moderated by Kirsten Kumpf Baele, lecturer and outreach coordinator, Department of German, University of Iowa. This event is being held in collaboration with UI Bijou Film Forum.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2022: Joel Barkan Memorial Lecture

Time: 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. CST

Venue: Old Capitol Museum, Senate Chamber, 21 Old Capitol, the University of Iowa

Presenter: Ronald Leopold, director, Anne Frank House, Amsterdam

Title: LET ME BE MYSELF: Teaching Anne Frank in the 21st Century

Abstract: The meaning of the diary of Anne Frank and the Anne Frank House goes further than the tragedy in which they are rooted. They also serve as a mirror in which we can see ourselves, confronting us with who we are, what the values are that make us human and, who we want to be. Shortly before the opening of the Anne Frank House in 1960, Anne’s father Otto remarked that we should stop teaching history lessons and start teaching the lessons from history. He considered the diary of his daughter as a ‘document humain’. But what are those lessons from history? What is the relevance of Anne’s legacy for generations, whose grandparents and even great-grandparents were born after World War II? Do the circumstances and events from the past still have a guiding significance in 2022? In his lecture, Ronald Leopold will explore why Anne’s words could help us to better understand the challenges of our own times.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 2022: Exhibition Spotlight: Anne Frank (Part 2)

Video recording of Exhibition Spotlight (part 2)

The University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums explores current exhibition Let Me Be Myself: The Life Story of Anne Frank through the Exhibition Spotlight program series in a special two-part virtual panel event. Pentacrest Museums Director of Education & Engagement, Carolina Kaufman will moderate discussion with panelists on a variety of related topics to share the story and legacy of Anne Frank and her impact on society.

Gisela Argote is a second-year Ph.D. student in the history department at the University of Iowa. Her current work extends her award-winning undergraduate capstone paper that explores the Mexican government’s response to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Gisela is currently working on the links between Jewish organizations and the Mexican government to overcome the complexities of the immigration processes and policies that allowed hundreds of Jewish refugees into the Mexican country. She hopes to highlight histories of resistance and survival of the Jewish peoples in Latin America by centering on Mexico. Gisela is the proud owner of two dogs and two cats, and enjoys supporting her favorite soccer teams on the weekend and a good psychological thriller novel on her off time.

Oren Baruch Stier is director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program and professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami, where he also directs the Jewish Studies Certificate Program. Stier served as graduate program director in the department of Religious Studies from 2007-2016. He is the author of Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 2015), and Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and co-editor of Religion Violence, Memory, and Place (Indiana University Press, 2006). His research addresses Holocaust testimony, Jewish memory, Holocaust education, and the material and visual culture of the Shoah. He has been a Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was the Guest Curator for an exhibition on "Race and Visual Culture under National Socialism" at the Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery at FIU's Frost Art Museum in 2013. Stier has served as co-chair of the Religion, Holocaust and Genocide Group of the American Academy of Religion and was a founding board member of Limmud Miami. He teaches and lectures widely on the Shoah as well as on issues in religion and violence and contemporary Jewish studies. In 2020-21 Stier served as the only university faculty member on a Florida Department of Education expert group writing new statewide standards for Holocaust education.

Volker Beck is a publicist and lecturer at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at the Ruhr University in Bochum. At the Tikvah Institute gUG he heads the Scientia project (Respectfully perceiving Jewish life & being able to read and recognize current anti-Semitism) within the framework of the research network EMPATHIA³ (Empowering Police Officers and Teachers in Arguing Against Antisemitism). Beck was a member of the Bundestag from 1994 to 2017.

Nicola Brauch holds the chair for history education at the Ruhr University, Bochum. She is director of the interdisciplinary research network Empathia (Empowering Police Officers and Teachers in Arguing Against Antisemitism). Her main research interests are in learning processes of historical reasoning and in history. Among her numerous publications is a monograph on the Anne Frank diary as a source of education for learning about history (Das Anne Frank Tagebuch: Eine Quelle historischen Lernens in Unterricht und Studium, 2016)

Kimberly Musial Datchuk has a PhD in art history with a specialty in nineteenth-century European art. As the Curator of Learning and Engagement at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, she connects the museum to the public and UI campus through teaching, research, and programming. At the Stanley, she has curated several exhibitions that center the work of women and the struggle for social justice, as well as an international loan exhibition on Ferdinand Bac. Her research and curatorial interests include institutional critique and the intersection of art, gender, sexuality, and technology, particularly in fin-de-siècle France. She has presented her research throughout the United States, as well as France, England, and Poland.

Sofie Decock is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University, Belgium. She conducts research in the fields of professional communication and German Studies with a focus on discourse, (intercultural, digital) interactions and persuasion. For the third year in a row, she co-teaches a Public Relations course in which students are given several assignments related to exhibitions on German-speaking Jewish refugees in Ghent during WWII.

Stephen Gaies has been the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at the University of Northern Iowa since its establishment in 2011. He was a professor of English at UNI between 1978 - 2019, and now serves as professor emeritus in the Department of Language and Literatures. His instruction includes Holocaust Literature, Studies in the Holocaust, Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Holocaust, and Genocide in Writing and Film. Gaies served as co-chair of the UNI Holocaust and Genocide Education Project between 2008-2001, and co-chair of the UNI Holocaust Remembrance and Education Program between 2006-2008. Gaies has twice served as program chair of the Legacy of the Holocaust Conference at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, and has produced multiple Holocaust- and genocide-related publications. Gaies received his B.A. in French from Hamilton College; M.A. in French from Indiana University; and PhD. in English Education from Indiana University.

Marc Grimm is a senior researcher at the Centre for Prevention and Intervention in Childhood and Adolescence at Bielefeld University in Germany. He worked as a holocaust educator at the Max Mannheimer Study Center in Dachau and was a fellow at the University of Geneva and at Haifa University. He is the co-editor of two volumes on education against antisemitism (Bildung gegen Antisemitismus, 2020; Schule als Spiegel der Gesellschaft - Antisemitismen erkennen und handeln, 2022).

Elizabeth Heineman is professor of History and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She has been at the UI since 1999 and teaches courses in Germany and Europe, gender and sexuality, and human rights. Her classes are sites of hands-on work, creative thinking, and collaborative discovery. The running thread in Heineman’s research has been the interplay of intimate human relationships and History writ large. Her books and articles have explored state regulation of gender and sexuality in fascism, liberal democracy, and communism; historical memory; the social upheavals of war; the intersections of gender and national identity; sexuality, business, and consumption; and sexual violence. Her interest in public history has led her to found and host a podcast, collaborate in the creation of a museum exhibit, and co-curate a digital crowdsourcing project. She is currently working on a family history that explores unaccompanied child refugees from Nazi Germany – and the difficult situation awaiting families who were lucky enough to be reunited. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. She is the 2010 recipient of the AICGS/DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies and the 2011 winner of the New Millennium Prize in Literary Non-Fiction.

Janet Hesler is a historian and curator of the Anne Frank Connection at the Danville Station, in Danville, Iowa. Unique to this museum are copies of pen-pal correspondence from 1940 between two Danville, Iowa, students, Juanita and Betty Ann Wagner, and Anne and Margot Frank. The pen-pal program was started by Birdie Mathews, a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher who taught for decades at the Danville Community School. In the spring of 1940, Juanita Wagner, 10 years old at the time, wrote an introductory letter about her family and farm to Anne Frank. A few weeks later, Juanita received two letters in return, one from Anne and another from her older sister, Margo, who wrote to Juanita's older sister, Betty Anne. The letters were in English, likely translated by Otto Frank, and enclosed were both girls' school photos. After the war ended, the Wagner sisters wrote to the address they had for the Franks. Otto sent a reply, explaining what the family had gone through and what happened to his daughters. The original letters were donated to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Museum of Tolerance, in Los Angeles. The Danville Station is the only site with permission to display copies of the letters.

Esther Hugenholtz is Rabbi for Congregation Agudas Achim in Iowa City. She was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and spent the majority of her childhood in southern Spain. After completing her high school education, she moved back to the Netherlands where she obtained her M.Sc. (Master of Science) in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology of non-Western Societies from the University of Amsterdam. Furthering her Jewish education, she studied at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Israel and was an E. Levinas Fellow at Paideia, the European Institute of Jewish Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. Esther completed the first two years of her rabbinical training at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, a seminary affiliated with the Conservative/Masorti movement of Judaism, and interned as a Rabbinic Fellow at the American Jewish University. She completed the remaining three years of her rabbinical training at Leo Baeck College in London, UK and was ordained a rabbi with this seminary in 2013. She served as the Associate Rabbi at Sinai Synagogue in Leeds, UK, prior to her current role.

Sarah Jadwiga Jahn is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Her main courses in police education are about Ethics, Intercultural Competence, and Training Social Skills. Jahn’s research field is regulation of religious and cultural diversity in public institutions. She also does consultation and training in religious and cultural diversity in public institutions. Additionally, she is co-investigator of the network, Constellations of the Relation between Religious Minorities and Majorities in Pluralistic Societies (funded by the German Research Foundation). She co-edited a handbook on regulating religious diversity (Vielfalt der Religionen. Ein Praxishandbuch zur Regulierung von religiöser Pluralität in Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2020).

Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele, Ph.D. is Lecturer and Outreach Coordinator of German in the Division of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Iowa. In addition to teaching courses on German literature, language, and culture, she created and annually teaches the popular seminar Anne Frank & Her Story. It is her proposal that successfully brings the 13th Anne Frank house chestnut tree to the University of Iowa and by extension larger Iowa City community. For this reason, she is collaborating with numerous campus and city organizations to put forward programming that connect with the anticipated sapling including her role as co-awardee of the Anne Frank Initiative 2022 (with the upcoming Provost’s Global Forum). In the classroom, Kumpf Baele combines learning goals and community service projects in ways that enrich student growth and the common good. Specifically, in Anne Frank & Her Story, she makes more accessible difficult (hi)stories and the impact these have on post-secondary students. With the support of an Iowa Center for Undergraduate (ICRU) full-year fellow, the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA), and the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, she is spearheading a project that will implement an interactive digital map and coinciding app to shed light on Jewish history in the Iowa City and larger Corridor area. Kumpf Baele identifies that the “body” can serve for students as a site of knowing not only the self but also for developing empathy for other persons both locally and globally. In this sense, her focus on community engagement draws parallels with and calls attention to the “helper figure” (the upstander) and the hope associated with this figure both in past and present times. A similar civic initiative has been her work with the Oakdale Community Choir which takes place inside the Oakdale prison, a medium-security prison in Coralville, Iowa. In conjunction with this volunteer work, she developed a first-year seminar “Penned In: Voices of the Confined” which asks students to study and discuss imprisonment in its varying forms. One component of the course includes a prison visit during which students talk with inmates about their experiences with art and literature. Kumpf Baele continuously pushes her students and herself as educator to personalize the past by localizing it with stories from the respective local communities. Kumpf Baele has recently published in Amsterdam University Press, McFarland, and LIT Verlag. In the summer of 2022, supported with a fellowship from the Stanley-UI Foundation and International Programs, Kumpf Baele will serve as a Visiting Fellow to conduct scholarly work with a focus on embodied pedagogy at Ghent University together with an Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting, and Communication which builds on Kumpf Baele’s public humanities work on Anne Frank.

Ronald Leopold was born in 1960 in Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. From 1978 to 1985 he studied history at the University of Groningen, and during his studies he lived for two years in Budapest, where met his wife. Since 1985 he has lived in Amsterdam together with his wife and daughter. After his studies, he held a variety of posts at the General Pension Fund for Public Employees, where among other things he was involved with the implementation of legislation affecting war victims. In 1990 he moved to the Pensions and Benefits Council, which he directed from 2006. Ronald Leopold has been the Executive Director of the Anne Frank House since 1 January 2011.

Waltraud Maierhofer (Dr. phil., equivalent to Ph. D. Regensburg, Germany 1988) is professor of German and also in the Global Health Studies Program at the University of Iowa. She loves to get students excited about another culture, learn what we have in common and what differentiates us, and explore human nature through narratives of human striving and accomplishments in its diverse forms. Her research and teaching interests include German literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. She is especially interested in representations of health and Human Rights issues (contraception, abortion, disabilities), in intersections of historiography and fiction, ego-documents and biography, but also book illustrations and text–image relations, and she has edited several historical documents and translations including nineteenth-century illustrations of the Reynard-the-Fox epic and Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1948 play The Devil in Boston about the Salem witchcraft trials. A translation of the novel The Child Witches of Lucerne and Buchau by Swiss author Eveline Hasler is forthcoming with Lehigh University Press.

Meghan Maleri is a junior at the University of Iowa studying Finance and International Business. She is a Colorado native from Highlands Ranch and loves being outdoors. In her time at the University of Iowa, she has had numerous opportunities to engage in curriculum surrounding Anne Frank including taking and assistant teaching the course Anne Frank & Her Story as an Honors teaching practicum student, instructing an Anne Frank workshop for junior high students, and leading tours of the Let Me Be Myself museum exhibit. She looks forward to the opportunity to share her insights about the universality of Anne's story across age groups and what it can teach us about the importance of combating modern-day hate and prejudice.

Deborah Michaels is associate professor in the Education Department at Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa. Michaels earned her B.S. at Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational Foundations and Policy at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on national identity politics and the exclusion of minorities in schooling. With funding from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, she is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Revising the Nation: Citizenship and Belonging in Slovak Schooling, 1910-2010. She is a co-editor and author in three special journal issues (2011-2012) dedicated to investigating how schools teach the Holocaust in post-socialist Europe.

Wilhelm Schwendemann is dean and professor in the Department of Theological Education and Diaconal Studies as EH University in Freiburg, Germany. He is also director of the FIM-Freiburg Institute of Human Rights Pedagogy. His research focuses on anti-Semitism and National Socialism as subjects of teaching, as well as media reception and religious socialization among young people; child and adolescent theology, police ethics, and nursing ethics.

Maia Sheppard is an assistant professor and coordinator of Social Studies Education in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. Her research and publications address a range of topics related to teaching and learning history, social studies teacher education, and teacher leadership. Sheppard's current research explores the role of emotions in social studies teachers’ decision-making. Her work has been published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Theory and Research in Social Education, and the Journal of Museum Education, among others.

Doyle Stevick is the founding executive director of the recently-opened Anne Frank Center at the University of South Carolina. The Official Partner of the Anne Frank House in the United States and the only partner site in North America. Dr. Stevick is associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policies, and former director of European and Russian Studies. Twice a Fulbright Fellow to Estonia, his research bridges Citizenship Education, the Rule of Law, and Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust. He has edited two books on Civic Education and three on Holocaust Education, as well as numerous articles. His scholarship and practice are focused upon building a Culture of Evidence and Community Upstanders.

Naomi Yavneh Klos, Ph.D. is the Reverend Emmett M. Bienvenu, SJ, Distinguished Chair in Humanities, and Professor and Co-Chair of Languages and Cultures at Loyola University New Orleans. From 2011 until 2018, Dr. Yavneh Klos was the Director of Loyola’s University Honors Program, where she led the creation of a curriculum emphasizing social justice and diversity learning outcomes. A leader in honors education nationally and internationally, she is a former member of the executive board and past president of the National Collegiate Honors Council and chair of the AJCU honors consortium. Since 2017, Dr. Yavneh Klos has collaborated with Windesheim Honours College, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, and Memorial Camp Westerbork, all in the Netherlands, on an annual, multi-week instituted focused on Holocaust memory. In 2020, Dr. Yavneh Klos was a Fulbright Scholar at Windesheim, where she taught “Diversity, Social Justice, and Inclusion” and conducted research for her current book project. “In Quarantine with Anne Frank: Lessons of Empathy and Compassion in a Time of Anxiety, Intolerance and Hate” explores how understanding the nuances of Anne’s story in the larger context of the Holocaust can guide us in addressing contemporary challenges of prejudice and systemic racism.

Dr. Yavneh Klos received her A.B. from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Italian Renaissance Studies. The author of numerous articles on gender and spirituality in the representation of both the virginal and the maternal body in Renaissance Italy, as well as three award-winning essay collections on gender in the early modern world, she is a former president and board member of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women.

The founding chair of the Council of Undergraduate Research’s Arts and Humanities division, the founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and former Associate Dean of the Honors College at the University of South Florida, Dr. Yavneh is committed to high impact practices that contribute to retention, graduation, and community, and is an innovator in interdisciplinary and community-engaged research, and the pedagogy of justice. She is a member of the steering committee of the AJCU “Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education” conference. In December, 2018, she traveled to Israel as a Fellow under the auspices of Media Watch International and the Jewish National Fund, where she was able to develop collaborations with educators at the University of Haifa and Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.