November 5-7, 2018 at the University of Southern California and Villa Aurora

BY STEPHEN SMITH. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, is the first person I have spoken to since the mass shooting which left eleven dead at the Tree of Life synagogue. She does not waste time greeting me in the doorway of her home in London. “So what are we going to do Stephen? We are not making progress!”

The app by USC Shoah Foundation guides visitors as they move through the plaza, providing explanations about each interpretive element, as well as personal stories by survivors, maps, photos and other multimedia.

Kimberly Cheng’s lecture, “American Dreams: Jewish Refugees and Chinese Locals in Post-World War II Shanghai,” examined the collision of cultures in Shanghai, which was significantly influenced first by the persecution of Chinese by Japanese invaders throughout the country, then by the influx of Jewish refugees, and after the war ended, by the arrival and presence of U.S. troops.

Called “Cake For Winter,” the sketch by Amanda Andrei stems from a little-known fact that was also unknown to her: During World War II, thousands of Americans and Europeans were interned at Japanese-run concentration camps in the Philippines. It was selected to be performed by actors at the Midwest Dramatists Conference in Kansas.

The history of antisemitism is strewn with the corpses of Jews who could not get out of the way when words turned to violence. The slaying of innocent Jewish lives by Pittsburgh gunman Robert Bowers, who this weekend turned his rhetoric about killing Jews into the actual killing of Jewish people, is the latest example. We need laws to allow intervention much earlier, or this will not be the last time we see Jewish people die in America because they are Jews.

Curious but friendly onlookers in the multicultural middle-class neighborhood in Amsterdam joined us. A café owner slowly crossed the street. “What’s happening?” she asked. “We are placing memorial stones in front of my grandparents’ home where they last lived before being deported in 1942,” I replied. “Please join us!”