Ithaca College

Judith Cohen, Chief Acquisitions Curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, speaks on Jewish Ghetto Photography during the Second World War. She will talk about how our visualization of the Holocaust largely comes from a Nazi lens, and how the work of Jewish ghetto photographers can expand our vision.

German photographers took the best-known and vast majority of Holocaust photography, including iconic images such as “the Warsaw ghetto boy” and the selections at Auschwitz. In this talk Judith Cohen will examine the ways in which our visualization of the Holocaust largely comes from a Nazi lens and discuss how the work of Jewish ghetto photographers can expand our vision, capturing aspects of life that were hidden from the Germans and introducing layers of ambiguity and nuance. How do photos taken by professional and amateur Jewish photographers in the ghettos differ from better-known ones taken by the Nazis? Does it matter who took the photo or just what appears in the image?

The talk is free and open to the public.

Judith Cohen is the Chief Acquisitions Curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is a graduate of Harvard University and received her MA from Brandeis. She originally came to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1995 to work on the exhibition “Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto” before moving to the Photo Archives, where she served as director before becoming head of the curatorial acquisitions and the reference branch. She has curated web exhibits and written and co-authored articles on the Museum’s collection entitled:  “Memento Mori: Photographs from the Grave”; “Three Approaches to Exploring the Höcker Album”; “Jewish Ghetto Photographers”; “The Mantello Rescue Mission”, and “Roman Vishniac: A Different Kind of Holocaust Photographer”. 

Presented by the Jewish Studies Program at Ithaca College, and sponsored with Ithaca Descendants of Holocaust Survivors, Ithaca College Hillel, and the Ithaca Area United Jewish Community.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Rebecca Lesses at rlesses@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3556. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.