MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

This thesis explores the comparative historicization of Holocaust memory in Holocaust museums in the United States and Germany. This study compares four different museums – two German, two American – that have not previously been the subject of monographic, comparative investigation: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the Holocaust Museum Houston; the Jewish Museum Berlin; and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. I explore the way in which museums memorialize the Holocaust and are shaped by national histories and patterns of collective memory. Discourse analysis is used to analyze the text panels of the four museums to determine the differences between how the American museums and how the German museums compare the Holocaust, and offer reasons for why these differences occur. The use of text panels yields universality to the study, since each of the four museums utilize text panels to display the main educational information to the public. In this study, I argue that the Americanization of the Holocaust in the American museums and the different national memories of the Holocaust in the United States and Germany account for many of the major differences in the museums. To demonstrate this, evidence from three different parts of the museums – the sections that cover anti-Semitism, Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and the conclusion of the Holocaust museums or exhibits – is employed.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2015, Theatre

This thesis explores Donald Margulies's play, Found a Peanut, and takes steps to dramaturgically link it to Robert Skloot's Theatre of the Holocaust, through both research and a staged production of the play. The paper examines Jewish Identity in modern American in theatre, specifically in the works of Donald Margulies, and unravels how Jewish playwrights insert trauma into their work. Combining together the theoretical analysis of Robert Skloot's works, the dramaturgical research of Margulies, and the process of staging Found a Peanut at Miami University, this project is an example of how to both mount and direct a modern Jewish American play that lies in the Theatre of the Holocaust.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

This dissertation is a survey and analysis of German-Jewish love stories, defined as romantic entanglements between Jewish and non-Jewish German characters, in German literature and film from the 1980s to the 21st century. Breaking a long-standing taboo on German-Jewish relationships since the Holocaust, there is a spate of such love stories from the late 1980s onward. These works bring together members of these estranged groups to spin out the consequences, and this project investigates them as case studies that imagine and comment on German-Jewish relations today.Post-Holocaust relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans have often been described as a negative symbiosis. The works in Chapter One (Rubinsteins Versteigerung, “Aus Dresden ein Brief,” Eine Liebe aus nichts, and Abschied von Jerusalem) reinforce this description, as the German-Jewish couples are connected yet divided by the legacy of the Holocaust. Similarly, Die Haut retten and “Die Beschneidung” (Chapter Two) reflect doubt about the ability for Jews and non-Jewish Germans to connect, but introduce non-Jewish German protagonists who disassociate themselves from Nazism and/or a negative German identity. The films of Chapter Three (Comedian Harmonists, Aimee & Jaguar, Viehjude Levi, Rosenstrasse) seek to bridge the divide between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. They portray individual German exceptions to Nazism through sympathetic female German partners romantically involved with Jews. Works in Chapter Four (Das judische Begrabnis, Schalom meine Liebe, Eduards Heimkehr) likewise disassociate German lovers from perpetration. These works suggest that positive German-Jewish relationships are possible by finding exceptions to perpetration. In Chapter Five, texts (“Harlem Holocaust,” “Finkelsteins Finger,” Deutsche Einheit) revolve around sexual encounters in which both partners manipulate the Holocaust legacy, indicating unfinished business between the two groups. German and Jewish characters' self-servin (open full item for complete abstract)

EdD, University of Cincinnati, 2005, Education : Literacy

In this qualitative research study of three secondary school Holocaust literature units in the Midwest, I examined responses from 3 teachers and 126 students as they constructed the Holocaust in English class. The participants at the first site, Adams 2003, were part of a middle class suburban community and were within a school with 98% Whites. I returned to this site in 2004 to co-teach the Holocaust literature unit with the teacher with a critical literacy focus. Over the two years, 91 8th grade students and 1 teacher participated in the study at Adams. The second site, River Hill 2004, was in a high poverty urban center with 98% Blacks. The total number of participants at River Hill was 35 10th graders and 2 teachers. I spent 369 observational hours within the three schools, and I tape recorded class sessions, small group discussions, and interviews with teachers and students. I also collected all written or drawn artifacts that the students produced. I began analyzing data by looking for the narrative frames (Ricoeur, 1984, 1988) participants used to interpret the Holocaust. Within these frames, I used critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 1997; Rogers, 2004) to further analyze the data. I found that teachers and 79 of 126 students at both schools used religious narrative frames to interpret Night (Wiesel, 1982), sometimes with lethal implications for Jews. I also found that students at Adams in 2003 and 2004 used narratives of hope to interpret the The Diary of Anne Frank (Goodrich & Hackett, 1994). In order to maintain their hopeful narratives, students eviscerated Anne from her treacherous surroundings and even stashed her death in what Morris (2001) referred to as “memory holes.” Students in all three units also enfigured Hitler as the sole, and demonic, perpetrator of the Holocaust, enfigured Jews as sheep being led to the slaughter, and claimed to learn 368 different lessons. As for the teachers, they each wanted their students to learn lesso (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2004, Educational Theory and Practice

The professional literature of the Holocaust is replete with research, references, and recommendations that a study of the Holocaust, particularly for middle and high school students, is most effective when combined with an extensive use of Holocaust literature. Scholars and educators alike advocate the use of first-person testimony whenever and wherever possible in order to personalize the Holocaust lessons for the student. This study explore students' responses to first-person Holocaust narratives through the lens of reader response theory in order to determine if prolonged engagement with the literature enhances affective learning. This study also explores the students' sense of personal ethics and their perceptions on moral decision-making. By examining their responses during prolonged engagement with first-person narratives, herein referred to as witness narratives, and evaluating these responses based on moral development theories developed by Kohlberg and Gilligan, the study also seeks to determine whether there are significant differences in the nature of response that can be attributed to gender. Lastly, the study explores students' views on racism, and how or if an extended lesson on the Holocaust causes affective change in students' perceptions of racism and their role in combating it within our society.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, History

Despite the fact that the Holocaust took place in a distant location and involved but a few Americans, numerous communities and local governments have chosen to memorialize the event within the United States. This paper will address issues of representation of the Holocaust, specifically in museums, and will contemplate possible alternatives for museum exhibitions. Museums provide a unique opportunity to investigate Holocaust memory. Museum visitors not only learn through their experiences in exhibitions, but they also walk away with some sense of themselves and the world around them. Suggestions for alternatives or alterations to the narrative style of Holocaust museums, such as an atmosphere that encourages and demands visitors to ask questions of themselves and the knowledge that is presented to them, will also be considered. Such questioning by both museum visitors and historians is essential in effectively representing and attempting to understand the Holocaust.

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2004, Theatre

This thesis exists in two parts, practical and written. The practical element was the direction of Ron Elisha's play TWO. The second part is this written thesis, which focuses on developing a critical framework for this play and others of its kind. Included in the written thesis will be an establishment of this critical framework, a structural analysis of Two, and an application of the aforementioned critical framework to the text of Two. Finally, a study of the application of this critical theory from a directorial standpoint will be undertaken, with special attention paid to the use of dramatic action as an expression of the changing nature of religious belief.

MFA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The proposed thesis, entitled Grabbing the Beast by the Throat, is a collection of original poems that explores the theme of resistance while also delving into the ways in which threats against loved ones, family members, homeland, and lifestyle can transform individuals in negative as well as positive ways. Most of the poems are written in the voice of an invented Czech poet who is a partisan during World War II; however, the collection also includes poems from other perspectives as well as poems set in the American Midwest in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The collection, which incorporates real and imagined events, is divided into four sections of primarily free verse poems and a smaller number of prose poems. The structure of the free verse poems creates a sense of unrestrained independence and spontaneity; however, the poetic content suggests the heavily controlled atmosphere in which the invented poet writes. The persona poems are often narrative, allowing the collection to move through historical events while inviting the reader to fully engage with the idea of resistance and its connection to contemporary issues.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2005, English/Rhetoric and Writing

While the number of Holocaust museums in the United States has grown in recent years, few of these museums which serve as memorials to the victims of Nazi violence have existed long enough to undergo major revisions. The purpose of this study was to identify and investigate in light of revision theory those revisions that occurred in the Holocaust Memorial Center, America's first Holocaust museum, during the recent relocation and expansion of the museum. Using existing theory in four fields, material rhetoric, museum theory, memorial theory, and revisiion theory as a base, this dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the museum loosely based on Carole Blair's analyses of memorial sites such as the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, as well as a catalogue and discussion of selected changes observed in the museum. Using analysis of archival photographs, visitor guides, and a videotaped museum tour of the previous facility to identify what had been, the study then moved to a careful analysis of the museum as it exists today. This allowed identification and documentation of changes or revisions that had taken place. These changes were catalogued using a taxonomy created for the study, and a discussion of selected changes was presented. The study found strong similarities between text revisions made by experienced writers and the museum revisions. Both were based on the same two key considerations: the identified purpose of the text, and the identified audience for the text. Both the text revisions of experienced writers and the revisions observed in the museum showed a willingness to make radical revisions if necessary. However, there was one major difference discovered between the revisions of experienced writers and the revisions that take place in museums. The revisions that occur in museums are not always the product of the original creator of the text. Implications for further research included replication of the study in publicly-funded or site-location Holocaust mu (open full item for complete abstract)

Psy. D., Antioch University, 2012, Antioch Seattle: Clinical Psychology

It is now well known that six million Jews, 220,000 Roma, 250,000 disabled persons, and thousands of Homosexuals and Jehovah's witnesses were murdered in the Holocaust. It is less understood that due to their ethnic identity that approximately, 1. 9 million Polish Catholic citizens were murdered during the Holocaust and that 1.7 million Polish non-Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps in Siberia, 2.0 million were deported as forced laborers for the German Reich and 100,000 were killed in Auschwitz. To date, there are no studies within Western psychology that address the effects of the Holocaust for this population and/or their descendants. Given the known after-effects of Holocaust-related trauma for Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families, the trauma response observed in other genocide survivors, and the lack of psychological research aimed at exploring the experience of non-Jewish Holocaust survivors, there is a need to study the lived experience and effects of Holocaust-related trauma with Polish Catholic survivors and their families. This is an interpretative study that explores the lived experience of six Polish Catholic survivors and their descendants. The sample included 12 participants comprised of six survivors, four second generation and two third generation participants. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine participants' perception of how Holocaust related trauma influenced their lives. Textual analysis found that the Holocaust has lasting effects for survivors and their descendants. Findings indicate that the effects of the Holocaust for its Polish Catholic survivors are similar to the effects of the Holocaust observed in Jewish survivors and survivors of other genocides. Survivors conveyed that the Holocaust related trauma they experienced continues to effect them in their present day life through: loss of family, feelings of sadness, Holocaust related flashbacks and nightmares, and disturbances in memory or the ability (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2024, Leadership and Change

Anne Frank is linked to her contemporaries in about 80% of 18 English-language published and produced plays. The remaining plays pair Frank and African American icons Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Research on dramatic literature with Frank as a character, the writing of plays linking her with African American personages, or history, analysis, or comparison of the process of multiple plays about Frank does not exist. A few articles extant compare the Goodrich and Hackett play with the Kesselman rewrite, a dissertation on five plays about Frank (those five plays are in the 80% mentioned earlier). The central question of this dissertation is why the playwrights of Harriet and Anne: An Original Narrative, Janet Langhart Cohen's Anne & Emmett: A One-Act Play, and Letters from Anne and Martin unite Anne Frank and African American historical figures. What were the playwrights' intentions with this linkage, and how were they fulfilled? This dissertation intends to fill this research gap in theatre history. The playwrights were interviewed using a prepared questionnaire completed by mail, email, telephone, or Zoom to discover the reason(s) for writing the three works. The writers answered using their preferred methods, and results were compiled within the work's question/answer format. Articles and the playwrights' websites were mined for additional historical data about the works and writers. The research found the plays to be works of remembrance/cultural trauma written by playwrights who shared seminal experiences regarding Anne Frank and the African American icons. The writers were driven by intense feelings of social justice, inspiring their creative works. These playwrights used Anne Frank, Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, and Martin Luther King Jr. to communicate their thematic messages of social justice. They urged their audiences to keep these icons' history from repeating itself and honor those entities. This dissertation is available in open (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2024, Educational Leadership

This work is a GIS curriculum study and learning system implementation of the first train from the Warsaw ghetto to the extermination camp, Treblinka II, on July 22, 1942. This was part of Nazi Germany's “Final Solution”, the last stage of the Holocaust, the deliberate, planned, mass murder of European Jews. Educational research has shown that it is not effective for students to only hear or read about traumatic historical events. For such an emotionally intense and controversial subject as the extermination camps in the Holocaust, students need to engage their higher order learning skills. GIS enhanced learning has been shown to develop those higher order learning skills. This research study and GIS learning system on the first train from the Warsaw ghetto to the extermination camp, Treblinka II, in July 1942 includes a history of the Nazi design and capacity building of extermination camps, a historiographic review of controversial themes of the Holocaust, a study of pedagogical methods and learning systems relating to controversial topics, and the Holocaust specifically, and the design, creation and implementation of a computer based, GIS enabled, museum learning system that tells this story. This case is significant as it is the first train of many from the teeming Warsaw ghetto of 400,000 to the newly opened Treblinka II camp where 7,400 were taken to their death that day and was the beginning of over 700,000 killed at this camp alone. This learning system is suggested as a pedagogical method for deeper study of the Holocaust and other similar traumatic topics.

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, German

Reparations and victim reconciliation have become a popular topic in the 21st century. In the fight for apologies, compensation, and corrections for human injustices, civil society actors play a necessary role in varied facets. Through qualitative research and case study comparison, I seek to investigate the questions: How did civil society organizations fight for successful reparations from the German government? Which factors lead to a successful or satisfactory outcome, and which to failure? By using Germany as the common perpetrator and respondent among the reparations claims, the study contrasts the experience and success of civil societies in their push for financial indemnifications and reconciliation. My focus is on the Jews following the Holocaust, the Ovaherero and Nama peoples for the Namibian Genocide, and the Roma and Sinti after the Porajmos. My research found that successful victim mobilization through civil society organizations relies on a combination of factors, including support from the diaspora, government connections, international support, and solidarity among civil society organizations. Additionally, this thesis finds that the advent of the internet has become widely beneficial to victims as they organize and mobilize efforts for transitive justice.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, History

This dissertation examines the rehabilitation and education of Polish Jewish children after the Holocaust. It argues that schools, summer camps, and children's homes in Poland were national and international sites for the rehabilitation of child survivors; therefore, they served as laboratories and arenas for debates regarding Polish Jewry's future. By comparing Zionist and non-Zionist institutions of child care, I illustrate how educators and caregivers engaged with competing ideologies to create normalcy in the best interests of the children. Rehabilitation was not just physical or mental; it required Jewish children to develop skills that would make them independent and good citizens. What did they study? What did they read? Did they learn Yiddish or Hebrew in school? Did they speak Polish in the classroom? The answers to these questions have broader implications regarding the reconstruction of Jewish communities in Poland after the Holocaust. While Jewish communists and Bundists in the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Zydow w Polsce, CKZP) desperately fought to keep Jewish children in Poland, Zionist organizations saw no future for Jews in Poland. Through an analysis of correspondences, meeting minutes, educator conference programs, lesson plans, children's own writing, memoirs, and interviews gathered through multi-sited archival research, this dissertation exposes tension between organizations and traces how the educational and ideological goals of the CKZP Department of Education drastically evolved under the growing influence of Poland's communist government. Ultimately, studying education as a form of rehabilitation and nation-building enhances our understanding of the delicate nature of rebuilding Jewish life after war and genocide.

Bachelor of Arts, Walsh University, 2022, Honors

This thesis examines the process of genocide and mass atrocities in the 20th and 21st centuries. In particular, the author examines five cases of 20th century genocides (The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodian Genocide, Rwandan Genocide, and the Srebrenica Genocide) that scholars and experts have determined to be genocides under the UN international legal definition of the crime. Through research, six key variables have been found to be common elements in and between the 20th century cases. Then, the thesis examines the 21st century cases of mass atrocities (Darfur Sudan, Xinjiang China, Northwestern Yemen, Rakhine Myanmar, and Tigray Ethiopia), most of which are still on-going. While all of them have potential factors of genocide, all are shown to be ambiguous as to their exact nature. This is because none of them have been designated by the international community to be genocides at the time of this writing. Thus, this study employs the fuzzy-set qualitative method of analysis in order to perform a comparative analysis between the 20th century cases of genocide and the 21st century cases of mass atrocities. Through comparison of the selected variables, the author shows how the 21st century cases align closely with the 20th century cases both with individual and total scores. The similar numbers between the various cases indicate that genocides are still occurring in the 21st century and the author notes the lessons learned that can be learned from the study.

Bachelor of Music, Capital University, 2022, Music

Theatre is an art form with the capacity to enact real change in our communities. Because of the wide array of topics theatre explores, it can help us to hold up a mirror to real life, critique and comment on proceedings within it, hold space for human emotion and therefore catharsis, and get viewers invested in a good story. This begs a responsibility for theatrical professionals to tie in aspects of community outreach to create a more enriching show, and harness the true power of this art form. In this project, I will be producing and directing Indecent, as well as creating opportunities for community outreach through talkbacks, service projects, and campus engagement opportunities. I will be creating a directorial concept, choosing actors, designing a rehearsal plan, finding costumes, set design elements, lighting, sound, and anything else needed to produce the show, all while organizing the opportunities for community engagement, complementary to the show's themes of LGBTQ+ rights and the history of Yiddish theatre. I have received permission also to conduct interviews and surveys of audience members directly after the show as well as check-ins to measure how the themes resonated with them, and later, how they have noticed them appear in their lives since, or any changes they have made. In the final paper in the execution semester, I will then explore these effects through the findings of this production and outreach components to demonstrate that theatre has the ability, and therefore responsibility to benefit others.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2021, English

This thesis examines the narrative techniques and trends within the genre of Holocaust fiction, including the representation of female relationships in concentration camps, the role of the third-generation of survivors, and the nonfiction novel. With this project, I intend to establish what is a “good” example of Holocaust fiction in terms of its representation of history as well as the fictional liberties authors take while still fulfilling their duties to history and the memory of victims of the Nazis.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, History

This dissertation is a global microhistory of 15,000 Jewish refugees who found refuge in Shanghai from Nazi persecution. The Jewish refugees had chosen Shanghai out of necessity and convenience: It was one of the few places in the world in the late 1930s that did not require an entry visa owing to its “open port” status as established by Western Powers in the nineteenth century. Not until after the Second World War and Second Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945 did China reclaim full sovereignty over Shanghai. As part of national reunification efforts, the Chinese demonstrated anti-foreign sentiments to the point of compelling Jewish refugees to seek outside assistance, but not without difficulties beyond Jewish refugees' control. This dissertation explores the dynamics that hampered the Jewish refugees' ability to receive timely humanitarian aid and emigration assistance in the aftermath of Nazism. Specifically, it aims to show how Jews in Shanghai faced the multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination and the ways in which these forms compounded their sense of being unwanted. Told through memoirs, diaries, oral history interviews, correspondences found in organizational and states archives around the world, this story illustrates larger processes associated with the end of a war: the experience of liberation, the development of relief and rehabilitation policies, and the functioning of migration within the modern nation-state system. The dissertation applies insights from the vast scholarship on post-Second World War Europe's humanitarian and refugee crises to Shanghai. In doing so, it uses comparative and transnational approaches to suggest that the history of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai should be understood as a global history of the aftermath of the Second World War. From Europe to the China theater, the dissertation sheds light on the deep effects of Western imperialism and persistent Eurocentrism and antisemitism on humanitarian aid and immigration poli (open full item for complete abstract)

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

People have been memorializing the Holocaust since before it even ended, taking forms such as that of statues, plaques, entire museums, and numerous others. Many have criticized these ways of remembering the Holocaust, but at the same time plenty others see the good that comes from having these memorials, for the nation of Germany and its citizens, as well as others who visit the memorials as tourists. Looking specifically at the Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas and the Stolpersteine, this thesis closely examines Holocaust memorials, their history, and how different groups have reacted to them. These groups include politicians, everyday citizens, and also my perspective, as someone who is neither a European nor German citizen and has no personal connection to the Holocaust or its victims. The two memorials, although quite different from one another in nearly every way, are successful in commemorating their respective Holocaust victims and keeping their memory and the memory of the tragic Holocaust alive.

Master of Arts in History, Youngstown State University, 2017, Department of Humanities

Beginning in the 1930s and ending in the 1950s, approximately one hundred and fifty European Jews came to Youngstown, Ohio in response to Nazi persecution. Many came to Youngstown because they had relatives already living in the area. These relatives connected Holocaust-era refugees to a new life in the United States. In the case of many displaced persons, who arrived after the end of the Second World War and the liberation of concentration camps, national and local social service agencies worked with members of the Youngstown Jewish community to facilitate their resettlement. Some stayed for a very short time and rebuilt their lives in other places in the United States. Some followed patterns similar to native residents of Youngstown. They stayed until economic conditions compelled them to leave the area. Others found remarkable success in Youngstown. They built businesses that employed others, established relationships within the community, and became another layer in the history of an area shaped by the cultures and experiences of the immigrants who came to call Youngstown home.