One Book/One Bucks Lectures

LECTURES

Michener Art Museum
138 S. Pine St., Doylestown

“Through the Eyes of an Empathizer” February 1, 1:00-2:00 PM
Free with museum admission and special exhibition fee.
Limited seating; advance registration required by calling 215-340-9800

Bucks County Community College art professor emeritus and artist Marlene E. Miller will discuss her Holocaust sculpture and those issues and events that help shape her art. An artist whose imagery is executed in the genre of social commentary, Miller will show slides and speak about the media, process, content and meaning of her work. Relative to the development of both her own consciousness and the evolving images, Miller will share a journey she made in 1992 to the death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz and Birkenau.

The American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing and Information Center April 3, 3:00-4:00 PM
Free with museum admission and special exhibition fee.
Limited seating, advance registration required by calling 215-340-9800

Deborah Cooper, Coordinator of International Services, Southeastern PA Chapter of the American Red Cross gives a special lecture and presentation on the work the Center does to expand services to surviving civilian victims of Hitler’s Third Reich. Half a century later, many still seek information about the fate of family members who disappeared in concentration or forced labor camps during World War II. As the Guardian of the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross continues, free of charge, its mission of trying to help families who have been torn apart by war to reconnect. Joining Ms. Cooper will be Ann Freed, whose mother had no news of her family after being taken from Ukraine to a slave labor camp in 1942. Through the efforts of the Red Cross, she was able, in 2002, to reconnect with her brother and to learn about the fate of the rest of her family.

Township Library of Lower Southampton
1983 Bridgetown Pike, Feasterville

Telling Terrible Tales: From Auschwitz to the Towers * April 7, 7:00 PM
Free but registration required by calling 215-355-1183

Michael Steinlauf is a historian of East European Jewish culture and the Holocaust as well as a son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. In this talk, her will use both these sides of his experience to investigate Art Spiegelman’s ability to wrestle with historical trauma in a radically personal way.

Dr. Steinlauf teaches Jewish history and culture at Gratz College. Fluent in Yiddish and Polish, he has been to Poland as a Fulbright Fellow and is project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is editor of volume 16 of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry (2003) devoted to Jewish popular culture in Poland and its afterlife, the author of Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (1997) as well as numerous articles on Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and Polish-Jewish relations. He is currently editing the section on theater of the forthcoming YIVO Encyclopedia of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe and serving as senior historical consultant for the planned Museum of the History of the Polish Jews in Warsaw.

*Also at the Doylestown Branch on April 28 at 7:00 PM (registration: 215-348-0332)

Yardley-Makefield Branch
1080 Edgewood Road, Yardley

Psychology and the Holocaust: Current Theories and Research on the Perpetrators, with Dr. Marvin Goldstein April 12, 6:30-8:30 PM
Free but registration required by calling 215-493-9020

Dr. Goldstein will discuss contemporary theories and research from the field of Personality and Social Psychology on the personality, attitudes and ideology of the Nazi perpetrators. Information will also be presented about the history and current activities of the Koppleman Resource Center, including Maus related holocaust literature.

Free Library of New Hope/Solebury
93 W. Ferry St., New Hope

The Borscht Belt: A Million Jews at Play April 26, 7:30 PM
Free but registration required by calling 215-862-2330

For much of the 20th century, summer brought about a million Jews from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey to vacations in the hotels, kuchaleins, and bungalow colonies of the Catskill Mountains. There, there swam in the Neversink River, were entertained by comedians and ate legendary meals. The “borscht belt” became the model for other popular tourist spots like Miami Beach and Las Vegas. In this slide-illustrated presentation, Irwin Richman, the son of Borscht Belt resort owners, brings this world back to life. Dr. Richman is Professor of American Studies and History Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg.

Bucks County Free Library
Levittown Branch
7311 New Falls Rd.

When World History and Personal History Collide – How Art Spiegelman Faced Two Such Collisions*, Barbra Shotel May 7, 1:00 PM
Free but registration required by call 215-949-2324

The inspiration for this talk came from Spiegelman’s introduction to his newest work, In the Shadow of No Towers: Until 9/11 his everyday minor mishaps and traumas “were more or less self-inflicted, but outrunning the toxic cloud that had moments before been the north tower of the World Trade Center left me reeling on the fault line where World History and Personal History collide – the intersection my parents, Auschwitz survivors, had warned me about when they taught to always keep my bags packed”.

Barbra Shotel is an attorney who practiced with a large Philadelphia law firm and as in-house corporate. She is now an independent consultant and freelance writer. Before law school, Shotel worked as a network television producer, writer and talent coordinator with credits that include NBC-TV’s The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and prior to that, The Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia. She wrote and produced interviews the guests who appeared on those shows.

Recently she became involved with oral history as an interviewer/producer and workshop leader. Working with Stephen Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Project, she has interviewed survivors of the Holocaust who reside in the Philadelphia and New Jersey areas.

*Also at the Perkasie Branch, April 2 at 2:00 PM (Registration 215-257-9718)

Bucks County Free Library
James A. Michener Branch
401 W. Mill St., Quakertown

Lecture* – A look at Themes in Maus May 10, 7:00 PM
Free but registration required by calling 215-536-3306

Linda Kuehl has a doctorate from Lehigh University and is Professor of English at Delaware Valley College where she teaches world literature, contemporary Southern writers and creative writing. She is a Commonwealth Speaker for the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and is the author or co-author of many publications.
Free but registration required by calling 215-536-3306

* Also at the Levittown Branch on May 12 at 3:00 PM (Registration 215-949-2324) and the Doylestown Branch (215-348-9081) on May 17 at 7:00 PM

Bucks County Free Library
150 S. Pine St., Doylestown

Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Society, by Danny Fingeroth, May 22, 1:30 PM
Free but registration required by calling 215-348-9081

“ Superman on the Couch looks at the origins of superheroes in ancient mythology, theology and heroic legend, paying close attention to the melting pot of pulp fiction and publishing in Depression-era America that gave rise to the first modern comic books. Fingeroth maps the evolution of the superhero, from square-jawed New Deal-ers and weird avengers of the night to inoffensive camp to postmodern antiheros, deconstructed objects and multimedia icons, and from kid sidekicks to Teen Titans. Along the way, he examines the enduring appeal of the genre, steeped as it is in wish-fulfillment and absolute values, and explores how the central tenets of the genre have manifested themselves in other forms.” (Part of a review by Matthew Craig, Robotfist.com)

Danny Fingeroth was the longtime editorial director of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man line and consulted on the first Spider-Man movie and on the 1990s Spider-Man Fox Kids Network animated series. He has written hundreds of published comics stories and developed characters and stories for animation. He puts out Write Now! Magazine, the premier publication about writing for comics, graphic novels and animation, through TwoMorrows Publishing. Fingeroth also teaches Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels and moderates seminars with Graphic Novel creators at New York University and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, including NPR’s All Things Considered and E! Entertainment Television, commenting on comics and on popular culture in general. His op-ed commentaries have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Baltimore Sun.

Program will also appeal to young adults

Township Library of Lower Southampton
1983 Bridgetown Pike, Feasterville

Kong, King of Skull Island * April 23, 2:00 PM
Free, but registration required by calling 215-355-1183

The story, lavishly illustrated, begins in 1957, twenty-five years after King Kong’s fall from atop the Empire State Building. Following Kong’s death, both Carl Denham and the body of Kong quickly vanished before any investigation could be launched, leaving rumor and speculation in their wake. Carl’s son, Vincent, was left behind. He is now a paleontologist facing a spiritual dilemma, which has its seeds in the disappearance of his father. Upon a chance finding of the hidden Skull Island map, Vincent contacts Jack Driscoll, one of Kong’s original captors. They piece together a plan and go to Skull Island in search of Carl Denham, King Kong and an answer to questions spanning a quarter century. From: www.kongskullisland.com

Joe DeVito is the author, co-writer and illustration of this work. His book is the official prequel/sequel to the original King Kong novel. It draws on a life-long love of storytelling, dinosaurs, adventure, and of course King Kong. It is the first of several visual novels he has planned. Over the past 20 years he has illustrated hundreds of book covers specializing in science fiction, fantasy, adventure horror, and dinosaurs. His credits include covers for Piers Anthony, Terry Bisson, Robert Bloch, Jonathan Carroll, Robert Heinlein and Katherine Kurtz, and illustrations for the last 7 Doc Savage books.
For more information on Joe DeVito go to www.jdevito.com

Program will appeal to young adults

*Also appearing at the Doylestown Branch, April 9 at 2:00 PM (registration: 215-348-9081), the Levittown Branch, April 30 at 1:00 PM (registration: 215:949-2324), the Perkasie Branch on May 21 at 2:00 (registration: 215-257-9718), and the Margaret R. Grundy Memorial Library, Bristol on June 18 at 2:00 (registration: 215-788-7892).

This program has been supported in part by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. The Federal-State partner of the National Endowment of the Humanities.

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