Upstate residents will have an opportunity to gain new knowledge and insight into the Holocaust thanks to two USCUpstate professors and B'Nai Israel Temple, who have organized "The Holocaust: Reflection and Remembrance: An Annual Spartanburg Observance."

Catherine Canino, assistant professor of English, and Robert McCormick, assistant professor of history, have partnered with Rabbi Yossi Liebowitz D.D. of Congregation B'nai Israel to offer a national speaker and a film series to enlighten participants on the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

Catherine Canino

"Determining who had the right to possess German citizenship was one of the first critical processes for denying Jews basic German rights," McCormick said. "The eventual result was extermination."

Robert McCormick

Schleunes is the author of Legislating the Holocaust, a book that takes a look at the Nuremberg laws and how they systematically began separating Jews from Germans. The laws, promulgated in 1935 by Hitler's Nazi regime, redefined German Jews as non-citizens and banned Jews from any political participation. These laws on German citizenship and for the "protection of German blood and honor" prohibited Jews from marrying German citizens, having extramarital relations with German citizens or raising the German flag.

Originally from Wisconsin, Schleunes received master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota. He also has studied at the University of Berlin. His other publications include The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939 and Schooling and Society: The Politics of Education in Prussia and Bavaria, 1750-1900.

"Holocaust: Reflection and Remembrance, An Annual Spartanburg Observance" also includes three films. The Revolt of Job will be shown March 21; Anne Frank Remembered will be shown March 23; and Conspiracy will be shown March 25. The films, which are free and open to the public, begin at 7 p.m. in Tukey Theatre on the USC Upstate campus.

The Revolt of Job is set in Nazi-occupied Eastern Hungary in 1943. Like his Biblical namesake, the elderly Job has had his strength and patience sorely tested. Job and his wife are Jewish, thus it is only a matter of time before the Nazis cart them off to death camps. None of the children born have survived to adulthood so in a last-ditch effort to preserve his name, Job unofficially adopts a 7-year-old Aryan boy. Just before bidding farewell to his foster son, Job advises the boy to keep his faith alive by searching for the true Messiah.

Anne Frank Remembered is an Academy award-winning documentary that tells the story of the Frank family and presents the first fully-rounded portrait of their brash and free-spirited daughter Anne, perhaps the world's most famous victim of the Holocaust.

Conspiracy, which debuted on HBO in 2001, is a historical recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi and SS leaders gathered in a Berlin suburb to discuss the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Led by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, this group of high ranking German officials came to the historic and far-reaching decision that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated in what would come to be known as the Holocaust.

"Since the vital message of remembering the Holocaust has emerged in the twenty first century not only for Jews but for all peoples, the creation of a joint effort by the Jewish community of Spartanburg and USC Upstate makes for a special gift to all of us living in the Upstate," Liebowitz said.

For more information, contact Canino at (864) 503-5657 or McCormick at (864) 503-5723.

2/06