Suchergebnisse

"How does a society reconcile itself in a post-genocide era? How can generations of those whose families were victims and victimizers break the cycle of hate, mistrust, shame, and guilt that characterizes their relationship? What family reactions do they face as they seek to begin the act of sitting across from each other and facing their legacies? For more than two decades, Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of composer Richard Wagner, whose music inspired Adolf Hitler and whose family helped the Nazis rise to power, and Abraham J. Peck, the son of two survivors whose entire families were murdered in the Holocaust, have been engaged in a unique and often torturous discussion on the German-Jewish relationship after the Shoah. That discussion has focused on their family histories and on the myths and realities of the relationship between Germans and Jews since the beginning of the nineteenth century and the process of reshaping that relationship for those Germans and Jews born after 1945. Rejecting the notion that they are either victims or perpetrators, both authors examine the "unwanted legacies" they inherited and have had to confront and overcome. "--

As this year's Sampson Center exhibition makes clear the powerful desire to find historical inevitability in the advance toward equal opportunity for all Americans has become far more nuanced by the sometimes discomforting reminders that advances at the ballot box are neither as clear-cut nor as unconditional as we once hoped. The ancient antipathies of racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia are not so easily elided by political campaigns and elections. The pace of social consensus requires a degree of patience and continuing attention that tries the very fabric of American life while we attempt to comprehend the consequences of change wrought by our heightened understanding of the implications of diversity in American life. Table of Contents: Introduction (Selma Botman, USM President) Quiet Revolution: A Tally of Black Victories (Bob Greene, for the African American Collection) Is It Good for the Jews? Is it Good for Everyone? Maine Jewry between Civic Idealism and the Politics of Reality (Abraham J. Peck, Scholar-in-Residence for the Judaica Collection) From the Closet to the Ballot-Box: Electoral Politics and Maine's LGBT Citizens, 1970s to the Present (Howard M. Solomon, Scholar-in-Residence for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Collection) ; https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/event_catalog/1003/thumbnail.jpg

The Ties That Bind opens a window to meaning in the material culture of Mainers outside the dominant culture. Focusing on family, the three Center scholars whose work is catalogued here provide a lens that allows us to peer through that window into something of the complex nature of difference. The three scholars reveal otherwise anonymous Maine people, whose very anonymity came from the difference that was culturally constructed to segregate them from the dominant culture. Family, which reflects something common to every different culture, works here to highlight unity in human diversity. In that way, family also provides a mirror for every one of us in Maine's increasingly diverse population. Table of Contents: Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine (Susie Bock, Director, Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine and Head, USM Special Collections) Diversity, Scholarship, and Learning (Joseph S. Wood, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs) The African American Collection Migration, Mortality, and Maturation:Three African American Families of Bangor and Portland (Maureen Elgersman Lee, Associate Professor of History and Faculty Scholar for USM's African American Collection) The Judaica Collection If Not Jerusalem, Then at Least 'The Jerusalem of the North:'Continuity and Discontinuity in Three Portland Jewish Families(Abraham J. Peck, Director, Academic Council for Post-Holocaust Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Studies and Scholar-in-residence for USM's Judaica Collection) The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Collection Ozzie and Harriet, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Culture Wars:LGBT Families in Maine, 1960 to the Present (Howard M. Solomon, Adjunct Professor of History and Scholar-in-Residence for USM's LGBT Collection) ; https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/event_catalog/1000/thumbnail.jpg