Explore the World

Come join us every Monday night for international folk dancing, featuring dances from Bolivia to Israel, France to Bulgaria, the USA, and on! We teach simple circle, line, and mixer dances accompanied by regional folk music. No experience or dance partner is needed. In March and April 2023, we will feature English country dance teachers and the popular Ceilidh dances of the British Isles.

RSVP Link: greenvilleinternationalfolkdance@weebly.com

Come join us every Monday night for international folk dancing, featuring dances from Bolivia to Israel, France to Bulgaria, the USA, and on! We teach simple circle, line, and mixer dances accompanied by regional folk music. No experience or dance partner is needed. In March and April 2023, we will feature English country dance teachers and the popular Ceilidh dances of the British Isles.

RSVP Link: greenvilleinternationalfolkdance@weebly.com

JAASC is hosting a Japanese & English conversation Meetup at Voodoo Brewery in Fountain Inn, SC.

Free and open to the public – the brewery has food and various beverage options (alcoholic and non-alcoholic).

Attendees should be able to hold basic conversations in English & Japanese—a great opportunity to practice those languages.

Provide Link to Event OR Email for RSVP ->  https://forms.gle/BUy2mYSrt6Fxr3KE9

IBM and the Holocaust will be a presentation by best-selling author Edwin Black on his research into IBM’s role in the persecution and genocide of Europe’s Jews.  This presentation will be moderated by Caroline Mills and open to the public, with no registration required.

(Edwin Black)

Witness the dexterity and skill of these world champion Irish dancers as they defy gravity together with Ireland’s finest musical and vocal virtuosos. Complete with original music and choreography, this ground-breaking production will thrill audiences with its emotional energy and imaginative design.

Frank Baker and Esther Greenberg will give a presentation that addresses the challenges and opportunities of teaching about the Holocaust by focusing on the stories of Holocaust survivors Felix and Bluma Goldberg. The Goldbergs were originally from small towns in Poland, and met after the war in a displaced persons camp in Germany. They eventually made their way to America and settled in Columbia, SC to start a new life together. This talk will draw from Frank Baker’s YA Graphic novel “We Survived the Holocaust”, from Esther Greenberg’s personal experiences, and from the website Stories of Survival, which features video testimonials, an interactive map, and primary sources materials.

Sales of the YA graphic novel “We Survived the Holocaust” will be available after the CLP, along with an author book signing.

Sphinx Virtuosi, the nation’s most dynamic, exhilarating professional chamber orchestra is dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in classical music. Comprised of 18 of the nation’s top Black and Latinx classical soloists who perform without a conductor, the musicians are primarily alumni of the internationally renowned Sphinx Competition. This unique ensemble had its highly acclaimed debut at Carnegie Hall in 2004 and has returned annually since 2006. Inspired by the Sphinx Organization’s overarching mission, the musicians work as cultural ambassadors to advance diversity in classical music, while engaging young and new audiences through performances of kaleidoscopically varied repertoire. Masterpieces by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi and Mozart will be performed alongside seldom-presented works by composers of color.

This is a 45-minute screening version of the 6 1/2-hour documentary film of the same name. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” examines the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany in the context of global antisemitism and racism, the eugenics movement in the United States and race laws in the American south. It also sheds light on what the U.S. government and American people knew and did as the catastrophe unfolded in Europe. The film was inspired in part by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibition and supported by its historical resources. The film was created by Ken Burns, Lynn Novack, and Sarah Botstein, and was written by Geoffrey Ward.

Following the 45 minute screening, three expert panelists will spend 45 minutes discussing the film and answering audience questions. Panelists include Dr. Jason Hansen, professor of History at Furman University; Dr. Johannes Schmidt, Professor of German at Clemson University; and Jessica Foster ’20, Doctoral Student in Digital History at Clemson University.

Viewer Discretion: This film contains mature content and graphic violence.

For more than a decade, a harsh Congressional immigration policy kept most Jewish refugees out of America, even as Hitler and the Nazis closed in. In 1944, the United States finally acted. That year, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board and put a young Treasury lawyer named John Pehle in charge.

This talk discusses the work of the War Refugee Board, describing how Pehle pulled together a team of D.C. pencil pushers, international relief workers, smugglers, diplomats, millionaires, and rabble-rousers to run operations across four continents and a dozen countries. Together, they tricked the Nazis, forged identity papers, maneuvered food and medicine into concentration camps, recruited spies, leaked news stories, laundered money, negotiated ransoms, and funneled millions of dollars into Europe. They bought weapons for the French Resistance and sliced red tape to allow Jewish refugees to escape to Palestine. In this remarkable work of historical reclamation, Holocaust historian Rebecca Erbelding pieces together years of research and newly uncovered archival materials to tell the dramatic story of America’s little-known efforts to save the Jews of Europe.

Come join us every Monday night for international folk dancing, featuring dances from Bolivia to Israel, France to Bulgaria, the USA, and on! We teach simple circle, line, and mixer dances accompanied by regional folk music. No experience or dance partner is needed. In March and April 2023, we will feature English country dance teachers and the popular Ceilidh dances of the British Isles.

RSVP Link: greenvilleinternationalfolkdance@weebly.com

Furman’s James B. Duke Library is one of 50 U.S. locations selected to host Americans and the Holocaust, a traveling exhibit sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association. In this presentation, Furman librarians Christy Allen and Dr. Jeffrey Makala will provide additional context for understanding the exhibit. Topics will include major themes and historical information, related events and resources, and their impact on Furman and the greater Greenville community. Attendees will then receive a guided tour of the exhibit housed in the Duke Library’s atrium. For accommodations, please contact Christy Allen at christy.allen@furman.edu.

Registration Required.

Before World War II, Lithuania was a great center of Jewish life and learning, and yet Americans today know very little about the destruction of the Jewish community in Lithuania or what Patrick Desbois has called “the Holocaust by Bullets.” Dr. Melinda Menzer of Furman University, will be recounting her family’s story. In 1941, the German army invaded Jurburg, Lithuania the town where Dr. Menzer’s grandfather and his family lived. Over the course of four months, the 2,000 Jewish Lithuanians of Jurburg, including her grandfather’s family, were violently murdered by a Nazi mobile death squad and Lithuanian collaborators, and their community destroyed. Dr. Menzer will also discuss how the U.S immigration quota system of the early 20th century affected her family, making it possible for her grandfather to come to the United States while denying entry to his relatives and so many other Eastern European Jews.

During World War II, rumors spread across the United States that Jews lacked patriotic fervor, evaded the draft, and shunned wartime service.  In a presentation based on a chapter in her upcoming book, Dr. Diane Vecchio disputes these anti-Semitic charges using her research on upstate South Carolina’s Jewish men in uniform.

The 45-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of moderated Q/A.

Even before the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 depriving Jews of citizenship and stripping them of basic civil rights, raised the alarm in Jewish circles, the Black press was quick to recognize the incipient threat.  Black organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League publicly condemned the persecution of Jews in Germany and warned against the spread of antisemitism closer to home.  Hitler was our “common concern” they argued, “because of the dramatic example he sets for other demagogues to follow in his sadistic footsteps.”

Once the United States went to war against Germany and Japan, Black Americans fought for the right to fight. They fought to defeat the greatest racial enemy on earth, and to conquer Jim Crow on the battlefield and the home front.  As the Germans retreated to defend Berlin, all black units including the 761st Tank battalion and the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion entered the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, coming face to face with the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews and the remnants of other peoples deemed unworthy of life by the crazed Nazi theory.  There was as yet no name for this crime, yet Black GIs from the South had something to compare to it.  “I didn’t know anything about fascism,” one soldier admitted, “but I know about lynching.” To him and his Black comrades, the murders they discovered were “lynching by the hundreds, lynchings by the thousands.”  These soldiers who had felt the closeness of death and experienced the shared humanity and love of the liberated were changed for good.  Their country would never be the same.

The 45-minute presentation will be followed by 15 minutes of moderated Q/A.