NEVER AGAIN IS NOW Podcast

Leon Saltiel has a Ph.D. in contemporary European history from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, and his book THE HOLOCAUST IN THESSALONIKI was the winner of the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. He is the World Jewish Congress representative at the UN Geneva and UNESCO and the coordinator on countering antisemitism.  

The World Jewish Congress's site on the Holocaust is https://aboutholocaust.org/ and the IHRA definition of antisemitism including explaining anti-Zionism is at www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism

Jessica Durlacher is a literary critic, columnist and bestselling author from The Netherlands. Her father is the sociologist and writer Gerhard Durlacher, who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. In 2005 she was a co-professor at University of California Berkeley of the course titled "Anne Frank and After." She and her husband Leon de Winter were approached by the Anne Frank Fund in Basel, Switzerland to write an authorized theater adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank. The play "Anne" premiered in 2014 and continues to be on stages around the globe.

Julie Brill lives in Bedford, Massachusetts, and is at work on a memoir that seeks to tell the story of her Serbian family in the context of the largely untold history of the Holocaust in Serbia. She volunteers in middle schools and high schools to share her family’s Holocaust story. In addition to Kveller, her work has been featured in Alma, the Forward, and the Globe Post. Julie is a lactation consultant, childbirth educator, doula, and author of the anthology “Round the Circle: Doulas Share their Experiences.”

Here is information from Julie on Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in Belgrade: 

"Sephardic Jews lived in Belgrade from the early 1500s. There was a thriving community with the world's first Ladino printing press. Later, a much smaller Ashkenazi population came from across the Danube River. The groups maintained separate synagogues, schools, and cemeteries and spoke different languages.. My grandfather's parents were a mixed marriage, he was Ashkenazi and she was Sephardic. This was quite unusual for its time: turn of the last century."  

And if you would like to know more about Julie's efforts to remember the past -- here are some links that she provided:  

https://www.juliebrill.com 

https://www.3gny.org/ 

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-why-is-serbia-so-reluctant-to-remember-the-holocaust-1.10567294 

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2022/01/27/holocaust-remembrance-day-julie-brill 

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/on-holocaust-remembrance-day-im-thinking-of-the-grandfather-i-never-knew/

Johannes Houwink ten Cate was born in 1956 and is professor emeritus of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively oh the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the persecution of the Jews. He is the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of more than 15 academic books and reports. His latest American book, "The Secret Diary of Arnold Douwes: Rescue in the Occupied Netherlands," co-edited with Professor Bob Moore, was published in Dutch and English. Yad Vashem will do a translation into Hebrew.

Michal Bilewicz is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, Poland. His main research interests concern reconciliation, antisemitism, dehumanization, and linguistic social psychology. From 2005 to 2006 he was a Fulbright scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2015 he received the National Science Centre Award in the humanities, social sciences and the arts.

Elie Alyeshmerni was born and raised in a Jewish family in Iran. During his high school years he studied in the United States. After his degree in linguistics from University of Minnesota he made a career in the U.S. in education, as a co-author of a linguistic college textbook, as an award-winning head of various Jewish schools and as a college instructor in Hebrew language. Currently Elie is the owner of an investment company. He served on the board of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, which is a prominent Conservative synagogue with a large Iranian-Jewish membership.  

Elie was part of a delegation from Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in 2015 that brought a new Torah to the Jewish community of Azerbaijan. Here are links to an article about this project in two different publications: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/170003 and http://www.visions.az/en/news/660/6187f77c/ Here is the link to a video about the project: https://youtu.be/cI91Z4_tIxU

Dr. Shlomo Fischer is a sociologist and a senior staff member of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI -- http://jppi.org.il/) in Jerusalem. He  has taught in the Department of Education at Hebrew University and is a founder of Yesodot --  Center for Torah and Democracy (www.yesodot.org.il). His research is about religious groups, class and politics in Israel and the sociology of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.

Israeli-based Emily Schrader is an expert in digital activism and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. She has written for numerous other publications, and she specializes in fighting antisemitism, misogyny and oppressive regimes.

Daniel Varnagy, the son of Holocaust survivors, is a full professor at the Department of Economic and  Administrative Sciences at the Social Sciences and Humanities Division of the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela. His research is in political culture, social capital, ethics, and strategic and financial planning.