 For those of you, I think almost everyone has a seat. There's still some seats in the front, and even in one or two in the second and third rows. So please come join us. And if your cell phone is on, I never remember to say this, but do shut off your cell phone or we wouldn't want it going off tonight during the lecture. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Ellen Yamansky, director of the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies here at Fairfield University. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to what, by my count, is the eighth Samuel and Betty Roberts lecture in Jewish art. It might be the seventh, but I don't know. My records, I think it's the eighth. This is a biennial lecture series made possible through a generous endowment to the Bennett Center from Larry Roberts and his sister, Suzanne Novik. This endowment was made several years ago in memory of Larry and Suzanne's parents, both of whom were devoted to the arts. Betty, their mother, was a painter. Sam, a photographer. Both of them were supporters of Fairfield University's Bennett Center, and both of them had their art displayed at exhibitions in the Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center. This endowment, I should add, has helped fund not only this evening's lecture, but also the undergraduate course in Jewish art that Dr. Philip Eliasoff teaches every other year, including this semester. So we're very grateful to Larry and his sister, Suzanne, for really this wonderful gift to the university and making it possible not only to have this lecture in Jewish art every other year, but also to help fund this undergraduate course in Jewish art. I am tremendously pleased and honored to have this year's lecture delivered by artist, curator, and photographic historian, Robert Hirsch. This lecture is an accompaniment to Hirsch's haunting three-dimensional installation of sculptural and photographic work entitled Ghosts, French Holocaust Children, on display now through March 2nd in Fairfield University's Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts. I'm trusting that many of you have already seen this installation. If not, it can be viewed in the Walsh Gallery from Wednesdays through Saturdays, noon through 4 p.m. The exhibit itself has been made possible through many university donors, including the Humanities Institute, the Center for Catholic Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Ignatian Spirituality, and the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies. Tonight's lecture is entitled Ghosts and Artistic Meditation on the Holocaust and Antisemitism. This lecture will include thoughts by artist, Bob Hirsch, not only on antisemitism past and present and on the Holocaust itself, but also on his installation, Ghosts, which, as those of you who've already seen it will attest, is a chilling commemoration of the more than 11,000 Jewish children deported from France to Nazi death camps between 1940 and 1945. Bob Hirsch is an American artist, educator, historian, curator, and author, best known for his writing about color and digital imaging as well as about the history of photography. In writing about photography, he is advocated for photographers who offer an expressionistic interpretation of their subject matter, something which he himself has done in his work. And again, when you see Ghosts, for those of you who haven't seen the exhibition over the Walsh Gallery, you'll see what I'm talking about. Bob Hirsch was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rochester Institute of Technology and a Masters of Fine Arts from Arizona State University. He's a former executive director and chief curator of SIPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York, a founder of Southern Light Gallery, a co-founder of North Light Gallery, and the curator of many exhibitions and public arts projects. Previously, he was a professor of photography at a number of universities, including SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Brockport, where he was also the director of graduate students in the visual arts and associate director of the visual studies workshop. Since 2000, Bob has led Light Research, a Buffalo-based consulting firm that provides professional services in the photographic arts field. And he continues to publish articles about visual culture. He writes books, quite a number of them, and creates and displays his art. His work has been shown in over 200 solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe, including several that like Ghosts explore the interrelationship of historical images with memory and time. And I understand from him that after March 2nd, the installation, which is now in the Walsh Gallery, will be going to Buffalo. And from there, it's going to Israel. Again, my deepest thanks to Larry Roberts and Suzanne Novik for making this evening possible. My thanks as well to Jennifer Haines, program manager of the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies for her hard work, really hard work in coordinating the many facets of this event. I also want to thank Patricia Berry, associate professor of history, Nells Pearson, professor of English and director of Fairfield University's Humanities Institute, Carrie Weber and Michelle DeMarzo of the University's Museums Department for helping to bring Bob's installation to the Walsh Gallery. And of course, my thanks to Bob Hirsch himself for being with us in the Walsh Gallery since early afternoon, for delivering the Roberts Lecture this evening, and for speaking in two of Dr. Berry's classes tomorrow. And so now please join me in welcoming to Fairfield University to deliver this year's Samuel and Betty Roberts Lecture in Jewish Art, Robert J. Hirsch. I want to thank everyone for coming out on this rainy night, and I was going to go through a list of thanks, but I think Ellen just covered it all. So I just want to say thank you, everyone who made this exhibition possible and brought me here tonight to talk to you. And so I'm just going to get to it by initially saying that I am not a traditional Holocaust scholar, nor am I a professional speaker. What I am is a visual artist and photo historian who has been expressively interacting with historic images to generate a fresh and meaningful way of connecting with the Holocaust. And Ghost is an extension of my other visual projects that explore the interconnections of photography with history and society. So this evening I'm going to very concisely discuss what I consider to be some of the key artistic, cultural, political, and personal principles that inform the making of Ghost and why I think it's relevant today. And it is going to be accompanied by the PowerPoint presentation that is now on the screen that will take you through a number of the images that are in the project, along with a collection of anti-Semitic images from the last and present century. I grew up in a post-Holocaust world. In 1961, I watched on TV the trial in Jerusalem of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. He was accused of crimes against humanity for his role in administering the mass deportation of undesirable people from Hungary to ghettos and extermination camps during World War II. Watching with me was my maternal grandfather whose family had vanished up the death camp chimneys. I was stunned. My family had never talked about it. I knew my father had left college to enlist in the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor and had spent five years in the military Army Air Corps during World War II, but I had absolutely no perception of the enormity of the Nazi atrocities. I couldn't comprehend systematically murdering people, including one million children, based on the acceptance of fictional racist points of view. I wondered how anyone, including my religious grandfather, could then put faith in God that would allow such a monstrous thing to happen. It seemed most people would rather believe in an invisible and all controlling but volatile God rather than face the unpredictability of human beings who callously repeat the same ruthless behaviors over and over. Seeing these black and white photographs of the Holocaust that were made by the allies from the liberated camps, naked corpses of women and men with numbers tattooed on their arms, piled degradingly like so much kidnling, made me feel as if my head had been split open and filled with monstrous fiends who pursued total annihilation. No images before or since have so profoundly affected me. They left an indelible streak of anxiety upon my psyche. Clearly, everything I had been previously taught to believe about the world was wrong. Suddenly, I found myself besieged with ancient, hateful beliefs, a rapidly spreading mental plague that resulted in the horrific deaths of millions of people whose only crime was being different from the group in power. These appalling grainy black and white photographs of the Holocaust subconsciously influenced my future, becoming a place I had never been but couldn't seem to leave. To deal with the psychological invasion, I began making interpretive pictures about the hateful behavior and the Holocaust that resulted from it. It took me literally decades of aesthetic and intellectually wrestling with the enormity of these ghastly crimes. Before I was satisfied, I wasn't trivializing the subject. One result of this struggle has been ghosts. During World War II, over 11,000 Jewish children were deported from France to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in convoys that rolled right up until the day Paris was liberated by the Allies. As a consequence of anti-Semitism, a disbelief in human equality of Jews, these children were among the more of the 75,000 French Jews deported under the Nazi extermination plan known as the final solution to the Jewish question. Of these French Jews deported, only about 200 and 2,500 survived. Most of the Jews represented in ghost were arrested by French gendarmes by the orders of the Vichy French government and who actively collaborated with the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. At most 300 of these children survived. All the rest are what remains in these found photographs. In this time of increasing worldwide anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and the rise of authoritarian leaders, ghost acts as a three-dimensional installation that is a eternal commemoration of these children's abbreviated lives. For them, there was no becoming, only an end. The project is based on historic documents and photographs collected by author, lawyer, and Nazi hunter, Sergei Klarsfeld and his wife, Bata, who both were targets of Nazi car bombings. What I've done is to reinterpret these documents through two and three-dimensional means to convey a haunting sense of lost human possibilities. This 600-plus expressionistic portrait analogy is a composite of an archival database, historic reference, and a media narrative. The process blends outer and inner realities, constructing stories that examine the extreme boundaries of human behavior beyond the guides of identity and include the issues of loss, memory, racism, and wickedness. This allows ghosts to explore this place between art and history from the perspective of that of an expressive photo-based image maker that enables me to represent the unimaginable. This approach promotes multiple ways of perceiving the Holocaust that cannot be achieved through traditional documentary photography, encouraging critical thinking and empathy. In turn, this calls for an accurate analysis of anti-Semitism, its nature, its sources, and the way it operates to facilitate the deconstruction of these deadly cliches. Defining anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a virulent and ever-changing form of racism that entails hostile actions or discrimination against Jews as both religious and as an ethnic group across all levels of society. Anti-Semitism turns the Jew into a damnable symbol of a wildly hypnotic manipulator which many societies use to define its most lonesome qualities. It is seemingly a disease without a cure that historians have called the longest hatred, which is based in the world's oldest, most lethal string of obscured conspiracy theories that claim that inexplicable events can be described with intentional explanations. It is perpetually fueled by individuals, groups, and governments that want to find scapegoats to blame their problems rather than taking responsibility for their own actions. Today it is directly connected to Zionism, the belief that Jews had the right to self-determination to the state of Israel in its 3,000-year-old homeland which has also been the subject of Roman, Crusader, Ottoman, British, and Jordanian domination. This has been done by actors who were disassociated from reality and attribute Israel with secret supernatural powers that replicate classic anti-Jewish slanders and generate judophobia. The embodiment of these bizarre conspiracy theories in terms of anti-Semitism manifests itself in many ways, ranging from expressions of bigotry and intolerance against individual Jews, applying standards to Israel that no other country is required to uphold and organizing government-sanctioned programs by mobs, state police, and even military attacks on Jewish communities. The compound word anti-Semite was popularized in Germany in 1879 as a pseudo-scientific-sounding term for Judenhaus, which literally translates Jude hate and was intertwined with the political belief that Jews were a separate race from white Europeans. This stigmatizing word is specific to Jews and does not refer to any other groups. Harvard scholar Ruth Weiss has taught that anti-Semitism has been the most successful ideology because it has adapted to divergent movements. For Christians, it was the Christ killer. The Catholic Church did not formally disavow this belief until 1965. For Nazis in the alt-right, it has been the race polluter and zag, the Zionist occupied government that is intent on ending American sovereignty through one world government that is run by Jews. For communists, it has been the international exploiting capitalist. Jew hate is the cornerstone of radical Islamic ideology that equates Jews with ritualistic baby-killing, organ harvesting, and world domination. For the left, the Jews are blamed for colonialism, economic woes, racism, and sexism. These irrational combination of collective hatreds and cultural anxieties amplify the expressions of anti-Semitism across the world and making it very challenging to combat. According to our own U.S. State Department and the European Union, examples of anti-Semitism, they now list, include the following. One, accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel than their own nations. Two, drawing comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, three, blaming Israel for all sorts of inter-religious and political tensions. Four, applying double standards by requiring Israel to adhere to standards of behavior not accepted or demanded of any other nation. Five, multilateral organizations who only focus on Israel for peace and human rights investigations. Six, denying Jewish people the right of self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist, even though Israel only represents 2% of the land mass in the entire Middle East. Those who question Israel's legitimacy never seem to question that of other nations, including in our own, the United States. All this animus makes Israel the diabolical Jew of the world's nations. Such blatant examples of racism, moral numbness and double standards, such as the boycott and diversity and sanction movement known as BDS are among the reasons why I've produced ghosts. Broadly speaking, anti-Semites consider Jews to be agents of change, which they find frightening and therefore resist. Jews are canaries in the cold mine. The witches may be gone, but the sinister, puppeteering, globalist Jews who are responsible for the world's ills remain. Since the end of World War II, three quarters of European surviving Jews left Europe because they saw no future for themselves there. According to the latest FBI statistics, two thirds of religious crimes in the United States are anti-Semitic. In 2017, the Anti-Defamation League reported the number of anti-Semitic assaults and instances of extreme anti-Semitism on American college campuses hit a record high. If we allow the bigotry to target one group without challenging it, it's only a matter of time before other groups are pursued and persecuted as well as affecting our passion for personal freedom. Representing the Holocaust, even as we have learned the who, what, where, when, and why, the Holocaust still remains cloaked in a mysterious fog, but that does not mean that we cannot describe it. Some critics have argued that only those who directly experienced the Holocaust have the ability to truly represent it. Others disagree, claiming that the aftershocks of this calamitous event continue to vibrate so intensely that anyone who feels its effects has the right to find new ways of representing and understanding such trauma. A third group believes no representation of the Holocaust is possible without trivializing it. For me, the artistic representations in ghost offers a personal connection to the Holocaust, which for me rescues, in this case, the brief existence of these ordinary children from the oblivion of time and space. Furthermore, in our very chaotic, post-truth environment of fake news where beliefs take precedent over facts, ghosts can be an interdisciplinary vehicle for bridging societal prejudices. This is accompanied by drawing attention to underlying communal conditions that results in monstrous, hateful behaviors carried out against people who are demonized for being different from the mainstream culture. The project also serves as a ballast against societal drift towards amnesia. Therefore, combating antisemitism is vital not only for Jewish people, but for anyone who values human life and the pursuit of social justice that transcends borders and time. Post-memory. This leads me to Professor Marianne Hirsch, no relation, who is the director of the Institute for Research of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University whose work deals with how memories of violence can be transmitted through generations. To help explain this phenomena, she coined the term post-memory. Post-memory describes the personal collective and cultural trauma that the generation after the Shoah has undergone. The generation after the actual event quote, remembers the experiences of the previous generation through the behaviors, images and stories that they grew up hearing and seeing. These experiences are so profoundly transmitted to them that they form memories in their own right. Post-memory's connection to the past is thus meditated not by recall, but by imaginative thinking and projection of the self into situations that though not directly experienced, are lived through creative invention. Traumatic fragments of events that defy narrative description and exceed the bounds of comprehension can also shape post-memory. Although these events happen to others in the past, the demanding process of understanding their causes and interpreting their aftermaths continue to inspire individuals such as myself into action in the present. The role of memory and the act of witnessing. If memory is a place of a thousand rooms, then as a member of the hinge generation, Jews living between the experience of the Shoah and the memory, I think it's essential that as the last of the Holocaust survivors die, that contemporary artists and historians step forward to serve as the next generation of storytellers who can bear witness and keep alive the memory of what anti-Semitism tried to extinguish. In this sense, ghost acts as a post-memory witness, willing meaning to those who suffered the Holocaust, crossing the boundary that separates them from us. Such an acquired form of remembrance can play a critical function in one's character as memory first influences and finally becomes identity. As memory is active and mutable, there is a constant struggle over how events are remembered and how to make the past relevant to the present. Even so, some give credence only to eyewitness accounts believing them to be quote, true testimony that is free from any aesthetic and narrative conventions or influences. But it is my position that even without being a direct witness, innovative, artistic, and scholarly investigations are necessary if the Shoah is going to remain pertinent in the coming years. In this ensuing manner, how the Holocaust is known, discussed, and understood becomes an ongoing transgenerational obligation. Failing to recharge these memories is taramot to a belated Nazi victory. If the story is allowed to fade, Holocaust deniers and other Jew haters will seize the opportunity to deliberately conceal, distort, and misapply the truth about the Shoah. Holocaust denial or the whitewashing of genocide as civil war may or may not be a problem in the future. However, Holocaust ignorance, forgetfulness, indifference, and misappropriation are bound to persist in a divided, inwardly looking America. People live within the history they construct and the past that are constructed for them. Our world doesn't have a single history, but rather many histories made up of a porous weave of data, invention, illusion, and memory, each with its own volatile interaction of possibilities. The Holocaust contradicts the postmodern notion that facts are fabricated and there is no impartial approach to truth. Unfettered access to fact-checked information and to accurate understanding of original documents and images and their context are crucial in helping us to form impressions of what the world was like before we were born. Our relationship with recollection and documented history involves a personal dialogue of prioritizing and ordering private values. The mind is a dynamic mechanism that constantly reworks memories, much in the same way we do with images to fashion an inventive outcome. Once you embrace a particular historical construction, the way your memory recalls them becomes altered, which affects how you interpret and react to events in the present. Ghosts confronts the ominous side of human nature, which permits people to carry out gruesome deeds. Artists make things by taking life as their raw material and transfigure it into fresh forms that encourage critical analysis. I know these mournful images are unsettling, but do not look away as they pose no threat to our safety. Look at them and tell me, what do you see? They can provide a gateway to expand one's knowledge that in turn can aid people in analyzing and responding to negative concepts and emotions in their lives. This is critical because awakening one's imagination directly opposes the total, the totalitarian process of deriving people of their positive qualities by generating empathy, allowing us to identify with our fellow human beings. Subsequently, this allows us to recognize the sameness of the human condition and its endless interconnections, thereby encouraging ethical people to speak out when they witness unjust and inhumane behaviors. This is vital because the worst thing one can do when confronted with repression or violence is to remain silent. Want to protect democracy? Teach people about the Holocaust. For the way we live as Americans is a marvel and the combination of responsiveness and knowledge is one way for citizens to confront creeping authoritarian intolerance. The post-documentary interpretive photography approach. Ghost employs what I call post-documentary interpretive photography, which operates in the space between art and documentary practice. Using this philosophical approach, I actively interject myself into the photographic process to expressively integrate the subject's outer appearance with my responses to it. The studio instead of the street becomes the creation site. This interpretive methodology puts photo-based image makers on equal footing with other artists, such as painters, who are allowed to form images based on their internal directives. As a photographer, I am no longer limited to picturing only external realities within the confines of a two-dimensional space. In this position, I find that sticking exactly to the remains of these horrible events does not allow me the artistic space for interpretive commentary. Louis Hein, the early 20th century muck-breaking photographer, referred to himself as an interpretive photographer, not a documentary photographer, who utilized photography as a tool for social reform. The brilliant film, Citizen Kane, would have been a lesser achievement if Orson Welles had entitled it Citizen William Randolph Hearst. In my mind, art making is adaptive. It's an evolutionary process among and between artists, their work, and the world. It is a functioning, pragmatic model that acknowledges and respects the premise that nothing is original and that our cultural heritage is founded on the practice of transformational art and that we do not make something out of nothing. This process involves borrowing, sharing, re-borrowing, amending, cannibalizing, morphing the full range of ways in which new art learns from, builds on, and emerges out of pre-existing archetypes. This is what defines contemporary artists and drives cultural advances in the arts. The philosophical and ethical stance lets me create images that had once been considered beyond the realm of the photographic arts by getting beneath the surface of the reality to present what is called the thing in itself, revealing a more complex, multi-level, authentic representation of existence. The thing itself, photography's transparent, even scientific ability to accurately reproduce the outer skin of reality has become the measure of truth that has asserted its ascendancy over other forms of the visual arts. This convention regards any deviation from the system as capricious, as fantasy, as sentimental, which is then condemned as being untrustworthy. Celebrated and fashionable photographers are the ones who generally stick closely to circumstantial evidence. Many critics and curators claim to admire such seemingly straightforward work for its alleged impartiality. I think such declarations are inadequate, inaccurate, misleading, and limiting because they fail to acknowledge that every single photograph is a subjective construction. I think that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything of value can be quantified. While I respect photography's ability to secure a two-dimensional representation of outer reality, I'm intent on getting beneath the surface. I do this by making images that evoke an inner state of consciousness that grapple with the subject beyond its external physical structure to look inside the heart of an experience. This allows me to explore the intuitive world of the thing in itself. And this is that multi-layered, and what you see in a number of the image, cultural, political, and psychological combination that help determine our world view. And this is one of the things that I've strived to do in making these particular images. By experimenting with historic material, I expand and re-represent existing narratives. I formulate a montage of illusion and reality designed to stimulate questions about how we know mankind. From this standpoint, my storytelling attitude is similar to taking a walk at sundown and observing that the day does not have an abrupt border with the night. Rather, it is a slow process of change. And again, this is part of what I try to incorporate into these works. So Ghost is an ephemeral series that's filled with all these twists and turns. They're really a kind of a pronumbra of elusive counterpoints that oppose defiant opaqueness that surrounds the darkness of these evil events. Methodology. Ghost is the result of collecting visual material that was discerningly re-photographed by guiding compositional and optical elements. It is a Socratic process that allows me to engage in a philosophical and visual dialogue with other epics, places, and makers. A method that emerges from the idea that there is no first version of how an image should look, nor is there a single fixed way to look at a work except with patience and an open mind. My artistic journey was to create an intelligent visual language that commemorates the children's existence while acknowledging the imperfect nature of remembrance and the complexities of re-representing something that is forever gone. Although I did have access to all the children's names, including those from my own family, I left the portraits unidentified to indicate that these planned exterminations were not merely targeted against individuals but against an entire group of people. Unlike Klarzfeld, I did not find that the names helped me confront the vile traits that orchestrated these mass deportations. Rather, it was the resulting collection of these portraits that took me beyond the words to psychologically convey the communal sorrow of lost time and lives not lived. In remaking these portraits, I did utilize photography's power for detail and specificity. I visually put audience face to face with other people enabling one to look into the eyes of another and hopefully see a little bit of oneself. Optimistically, this can make one feel a little bit more connected and compassionate towards your fellow human beings. Central to this is how the metaphysical contradictions and opposing social forces that swirl around these images can transcend the circumstances of their making and render their interpretation changeable over time. I rely on camera optics to record the pictorial actions that bring together content, form, and life by asking each picture a question in order to examine its origin and how its significance has changed over time. During this visual conversation process, which is part tribute, part protest, and wholly about discovery, I work with images to come up with answers to my own questions about them by means of chance, formal composition, juxtaposition, and layering. Conceptually, I consider myself to be a photographic etymologist examining the evolution and complexity and the richness of meaning as it unfolds within my frame. The one fifth scale boxcars which anchor the project are based on blueprints of the actual wooden boxcars used by the state-owned French railroad that were known as 40 and eights because they were designated to carry either 40 soldiers or eight horses. Instead, the French crammed up to 120 children into one car with no bathroom, no food, no water, and ventilation for trips that lasted up to four days. The French were not directly asked to do this. Rather, they did it as a sign of goodwill to their German occupiers. The efficient roundup and deportation of the French Jewish children required the cooperation of endless French citizens from the country's president to the train's engineer. The French genocidal partnership with the Nazis which made a mockery of their own laws and traditions led them to what Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldenhorn called Hitler's willing executioners. Sadly, the French were not alone. The Axis powers of Germany and Italy found ready collaborators in over 30 countries in Europe, Africa, and the mid-east including the Grand Mouffi of Jerusalem who personally visited with Hitler. It was an act of complicity, wanton indifference, and or a willful ignorance of millions of people that enabled the Nazis to commit mass murder. In effect, the boxcars are an encapsulated psychological vessel of this catastrophic isolation that distills and summarizes the structure and the radical dynamics that underlie the Holocaust and act as a reminder that autocratic leaders can quickly make freedom disappear. Some conclusions, just as most black and white photographs are shades of gray, people are rarely one thing or another. We are a continuum of biological, cultural, and environmental factors. We regularly put together contradictory behaviors and viewpoints, such self-justifications permit us to ignore or diminish the real-world effects of our behavior. Evil assumes more nefarious forms than murderers or rapists. Wrongdoing also occurs in those of us who are Sierra Club members and recycle our trash, but who on occasion realize that idealism we pursue is also selfish and that such self-centeredness seems to be hardwired. In the book, The Selfish Gene, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins asserts a gene will operate in its own interest, even if that means destroying the host organism, thereby making selfishness the core of human existence. Dawkins' position fortifies the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes' case for a social contract that establishes an authority to regulate human self-interest and to maintain societal order. As President James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, but what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections of human nature? If men were angels, no government wouldn't be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. This combination of culture, nature, and science makes Swiss cheese out of religious notions of predestination, heaven and hell, as well as the utopian ideologies of communism and fascism. These belief systems all have their roots in authoritarian impulse and faith, which criminalizes certain types of conduct and thought. In each of these cases, the belief in the common denominator of submission to a higher authority demolishes the distinction between public and private life. Instead, controls and prohibitions on everything from diet to sex are governed by the same question. Are you one of us or are you one of them? Such imposed ethnocentric positions, believing that one and one's group to be the center of the universe and all the measure within it makes pluralism a flexible society with a tolerance for difference impossible to achieve. Without an open pluralistic society, it's extremely challenging for anyone to find and express their true voice about anything. For democratic pluralism to work, one must abide by a secular social contract that binds all citizens together and separates public duties from private beliefs, customs and values. The culmination of openness and tolerance can't be abridged as it is necessary for diversity and research to prosper. This dovetails into what I call the possibility scale, which states there are no artistic impossibilities, only different levels of possibility. It grants one the freedom to act without precondition to determine an idea's usefulness by declaring to yourself, if I can visualize it, there could be a way to realize it. It allows artists of all types to take charge and will things into existence. This is the essence of inventive thinking that encourages visualization of the unusual, the hidden, the strange, the unknown and most importantly, the not yet thought of. As the critic Robert Scholes wrote, to live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future. This premise entails being an advocate of new viewpoints who is willing to engage in what I call thought provoking, troublemaking and experimentation. For image makers like myself, it's about building thought provoking pictures that awaken our sense of curiosity and speculation, thereby helping to alter artistic, social, political climates and hopefully bring about new and missing concepts into actuality. Awareness is what I think is the artist's holy grail. Everything that we let in, everything we remember and everything we forget depends on it. In this state, one relies on seeing intensely to make images that depict, express and engage viewers about the often clashing and seemingly discordant mashups of human behavior. Trust yourself, listen to and respond to what engages you, for this is what will empower you. Our minds work through contradiction for when everyone thinks alike, development and progress cease and society stagnates. History reminds us that the accepted theories of one time often turn out to be flawed and the views not privileged by the establishment can offer fresh ways of doing things. Therefore, if a society is to move forward, it must prevent a straightforward rivalry of different outlooks and principles so that clarity and consensus about a situation may emerge. Transcending time, within this tangle of ambiguous inconsistencies and human foils of cruelty, fear, greed, ignorance, resentment and paranoia, time stands out as the essential characteristic before the void that informs image making and other creative activities. We are all bound by the limits of time on our bodies, for this is what gives our lives ambition and urgency and leads us to make choices about who we are, what we want to be and what we want to accomplish. Times arrow measures change and without variation, there can be no productive activity. Imaginative human endeavors are performances in opposition to the fact that there is no other reason, other than fairy tales, why human beings are here at all. Innovative creative people demonstrate their gift of existence by challenging the status quo and offering opportunities for exploring the mind. As the English photographer Madame Yavande said, be creative or die. To make something new, to transcend existing models, one must have an honest and critical relationship with history, idea formation, and be familiar with one's own internal principles. Dishonesty is by far the biggest obstacle in making any type of authentic work. Dissemption undermines work's internal integrity, the only standard by which any work can succeed. Work that is solely a vehicle for one's own agenda and ego is limited in its reach. Images expressing elements that take us beyond ourselves have the power to amaze, engage, and generate thoughtful responses. When people have nothing to anticipate, the ticking of time becomes death's coworker, allowing the darkness of anxiety and despair to gain traction. The struggle between gloom and hopefulness can produce enhanced realities. Idolability along with wasted talent triggered despair and frustration. Mindful action, the best use of one's essential capabilities and capacities help to navigate and enrich human experience. Since death is not an artist, we create to defy and transcend time. We all struggle under the weight of our own certain demise, but this pressure is a vessel which marvelous things are made and communicated, which can express, enrich, expand, and influence the human experience which English writer Oscar Wilde said is the name we give to our mistakes. There is one thing that teaches us, it's how to live. Writer-photographer Eudora Welty said, making reality real is art's responsibility. This involves making the stakes of those involved in a crisis tangibly visible with a goal that it might help to propel changes, one person at a time that is necessary to provoke eventually a mass response. Can artists and other creative people play a vital role in the cycle of life? Absolutely. Attention and endurance are what matter. What is required to utilize your attributes to make possibilities reality and to become who you are. Thank you for looking and listening. Before I open the floor for questions, I'm wondering if you could just speak to us a little more about some of the artistic choices that you made in creating this installation. So for example, and I asked you this earlier this afternoon, a number of the photographs are faces, but several faces superimposed on one another. And I'm wondering if you could share with us how you made the choice of which faces to put together. And also I think what I really learned not only in talking to you this afternoon but in seeing these slides is how you made the choice to let the curators of the installation decide where the photographic images go. So if you haven't yet seen the installation, you won't know this, but if you have been there, you may have noticed that tonight the photos were from another time that you did the installation and the curator chose to put the photographs and the train cars in a different order. So if you could say more about that. I mean, in other words, for me not being an artist, I would think that part of the vision would be where the photographs would go. But in this case, that was not true. So if you could share that with us. Yeah, in terms of working, I had a tremendous amount of source material to work with and I worked just with the pictures themselves for well over a year because I couldn't work with them for more than maybe half an hour at a time before I would like literally to start to cry. And so I would just have to, it took me a long time just to go through the material and to start to reinterpret it. And I think because I spent so much time looking at all these pictures and then having to decide which ones I would pick to work with, a lot of what went on was kind of like psychological. And that I think I started seeing connections with all these people who probably, I mean, may not have had any connection except that they ended up in the same horrible situation. But somehow they became, instead of just individuals, they also became like a collective. And so I found myself like blending pictures to create multiples of what was going on. So as I mentioned in the talk, I mean, the whole purpose of the final solution I mean, it wasn't just to eliminate individuals, it was to eliminate an entire group of people. And so I think also by bringing pictures together, it became a way like to unify these people visually. And it also, by creating layers, it also becomes like another way to kind of like look through time. I mean, in a way, to me you're seeing like, possibly the past, the present, the future. And there were other ways where you could see like different levels of how people were dressed, expressions on the faces. And so it became a collective way of dealing with more people than I could do individually. And in terms of how to set up the exhibition, I've done a whole series over the last number of years of various projects that are informed by history. And it's a way for me to combine my interest of the visual arts and my interest in history. And all these projects have been, this is probably like the smallest one. I mean, they become like these big sprawling installations. And what I found, I mean was that when they would travel to other locations, I really had no idea like what this other space was gonna be like. A lot of them traveled internationally or went to California or wherever. And so I decided that I would make part of this kind of an interactive experience. And I know from having run galleries and have been a gallery director that galleries have trained staff and people that also know something about the art. So what I decided to do was to allow each venue that it went to to install the work that any way they saw fit. It was like make the work work in your space. And how you set it up, it's gonna tell a slightly different story. And that's great because I actually then learned something too because I see things that I hadn't seen in my own work when someone else then interacts with it. And I was telling someone today that this originally stems back to a project that I did years ago that was called World in a Jar War and Trauma. And it involves a historic look of the last 400 years of human warfare. And all the images were placed in 32 ounce jars. And initially I had set this thing up in my studio and I had spent like all this time elaborately arranging these jars with pictures in it so I could create all these juxtapositions and all these, you know, one picture could comment on another and it was really complicated. And my wife who was also an artist, when I got done with it, I said to her, you know, when you get a chance, go in the studio and see what you think of my arrangement. And I came back a couple of hours later and my wife had rearranged all the jars and I just like went through the roof. I had like a total meltdown because I had spent like all this time, you know, creating the perfect arrangement that told the perfect story. But when I cooled down and started looking at what she did, I realized that there was a whole other story that I was missing. And then I started just like randomly arranging the jars and every time I made another arrangement, another story was told. And so this kind of gave me the idea to try and see like what would happen if I just let someone install it any way they wanted. And World in a Jar went on to like over 20 venues and it was installed 20 different ways and 20 different places, including in a church. And every one of them was great. And I would look at them and I'd go, I would have never thought to do it that way. And it was because I let these other people interact with it and they then took the story and told another story with it. So that's what I think happened here. I walked into the gallery and just went, you got it. It's great. It's perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. Would I have done it that way? Probably not, but I love it. And I'm glad that it's installed that way. Thank you. And again, for those of you who haven't seen the installation yet, I really recommend that you do. I have to say I love the way it's installed at the Walsh Gallery. Yeah, it's great. Because it really takes us on a journey. That first there are the photos, just the faces and then there are the three devastating cars and some of those faces in the cars. And then the last part of the installation, which I don't think I saw on a slide, which are the bricks and the lithopains. And maybe you can say just a few words about how you, is that always the end of the installation? The lithopains? Yeah. The lithopains were just added. Really? Yeah. I love them. So maybe you could just say. Lithopains are like an old 19th century process of making transparent images. And it's actually a somewhat complicated process. And we've simplified it a little bit in the digital age. And if you go and check out the show, you'll see that there is a pedestal that has these lithopains that are lit from beneath. And what happened in this case is that we took images from the series and made what's called a digital transfer. And we melted that onto a piece of plastic that was then used like a laser cutter and it cuts the image out. And then we took this piece of plastic that was like a three-dimensional relief of the picture. And we cast it in plaster of Paris. And you then get a mold. And then in the mold you pour porcelain. Then you take the porcelain and put it in a kiln and heat it to about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. And it forms what they call a lithopain. And the lithopain, if you just look at it, looks opaque. But if you hold it up to light, you can see through it. So we put a number of these images on these panes and what's holding the panes up on the display are actually old kiln bricks that are made to represent the bricks and the crematoriums at the camps. Thank you so much. Questions? Have you considered presenting this at UNESCO World Headquarters in Paris? I'd love to, if you know someone there. I think you should definitely pursue it. I'll tell you, I mean, I work independently. So I mean, all this stuff like this just happens in my spare time, but I have probably tried harder to get this project shown than any project in my career. And I've had less success getting this shown than any project I've ever done. I mean, no one wants to show it. So if you know anyone, I would be happy to contact them. But it's really been incredibly frustrating, the lack of response to the project. I mean, I can contribute it to a whole host of reasons, but that's the reality of it. And I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. And I mean, I know what to do. And it just hasn't happened. And I don't think it's because the work isn't strong. I think there are other factors that are keeping it from being shown. One of the visceral reactions to it was, the children are so beautiful. And yet, they kind of drive to look away. And I think it's such a powerful exhibit, but there's part of us that just don't want to see it. Yeah, I know. And wanna turn it on, I'm just wondering what your thoughts are about that. Well, I mean, like I said, I mean, it is tough work. And, but I think if people don't confront tough issues, I mean, the issues only get tougher. And I mean, I thought growing up in the United States, that anti-Semitism was relatively speaking, a much smaller problem here than any place else. But I think events in the last recent times, I mean, have proved against that belief. And so I think more than ever, this project seems pertinent because that's the underlying issue. I mean, it's anti-Semitism that led to all these people's deaths. So I think turning away from tough things doesn't make them go away. And I guess as an aside, I mean, I've been involved in a number of other kind of social justice issues. So I'm kind of the guy who gets up on the soapbox and squawks, but what I've found, I mean, is that small groups of people can make really big changes. And like where I currently live, which is in Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, I mean, was known, I mean, as, well, now it's a rust-belt city, but it was a city of much industry. And like one of the industries that was left was a place called Tanawan the Coke. And we're not talking about Coca-Cola, we're talking about the kind of coke that's made, that they use to produce steel. And it's a really nasty process. And this Tanawan the Coke has just been like a giant ecological disaster for the Buffalo area for like a hundred years. And the short story is that my wife and I and four other people over a period of 20 years brought Tanawan the Coke down. The plant is closed. It had the EPA fine Tanawan the Coke, that's the largest EPA fine ever placed on a company. And that's what, literally four people ended up, of course, over time, more people got involved, but it started with just a couple of people saying, no, this isn't right and something has to be done about it. And I see this as the same kind of thing. I mean, I know it's not gonna go away, but if we turn our back, it's only gonna get worse. And in this age of rising authoritarianism, I mean, it makes me even more alarmed because authoritarian people tend to pick groups and blame them for all the ills of a society. And so, I mean, I find that alarming and it dovetails back to this. Any other questions? Any students? Now, this would be exciting. Is there a brave student out there who would like to ask a question? I'm gonna come down the aisle here. And we have a lot of students here tonight which is wonderful. Any of you guys have a question to ask? How many of you have actually seen the installation? Okay, so those of you who've seen it, some reactions, and what did you all think, for example, those of you who haven't seen it may not realize it, but there is no written text in the installation itself. You walk in and you're really immersed in the world of these children. Students who saw this, did you think that was a good decision, a bad, did you? Were you able to get into the exhibit? I think it was very interesting because if we were seeing a narrative of what was happening, it was like as if it was telling a story of the life of this children. And as you said, when we saw the small trains, they were all together, they looked like they were going to the same path. But something that occurred to me, and I didn't hear you say it was like, what interests you in really getting to this topic and talking, trying to present this topic to the world? I don't know if I have to touch you in a way of your family. I don't know if you have a Jewish family. I don't know if there's Jewish people in the room, but what really touched you into presenting this to a world or what was something that you wanted to show your other artists, people? Well, I mean, from the personal standpoint, probably 90% of both my moms and Pa's family who were in Europe were wiped out. I mean, I just even had no connection to these people. I mean, it was like a handful of pictures. And I mean, so I grew up with a very small family and as I mentioned in the talk, I mean, no one talked about it. It was just, I think, probably too fresh, whatever I mean. And as I also had mentioned, as I became older and really initially through watching the Adolf Eichmann trial that they broadcast parts of in the United States, I mean, for me that was like a real turning point in wanting me to know more about it and to understand what had happened. And I had gone to Hebrew school, but where I went to Hebrew school, it was a non-topic. I mean, it was never discussed. It just wasn't on the agenda. I mean, we would learn about the Old Testament and we would hear Bible stories and we were always out selling trees to plant in Israel. But the Holocaust, I mean, didn't exist. I mean, it just wasn't on the agenda. So there was like this big, like just blank slate and growing up, I grew up in and around New York and I met people who were survivors. And the same thing, I mean, most of, I mean, didn't wanna talk about it. And so it just became for me kind of like a self-educating moment, something that propelled me. And so I just started my own educational course in learning about the Holocaust and then going back and learning about the history. Cause I mean, to understand that you had to learn what happened before it that made it possible. So I mean, when I had mentioned I've always, I had an interest in history. So this wasn't that, it wasn't directly in my area of interest, but it was a big side issue. And then as an artist, by the time I was probably in graduate school, I started to try and think of ways to address the issue. And I never succeeded. I have decades of failures of projects that I began and threw in the dustbin because I just didn't think it did it justice. So this was finally after basically a lifetime of meditating on what I was able to come up with that I thought was at least was satisfying to some degree to myself. And hopefully would connect with others. And then through that becomes an agent of change. Yeah, we'll just have time for one more question. So. Why French children? What did you say, Jerry? Why French children? Oh, why French children? Well, in this case, I mean, there are so many, you know, I had to limit it. And in this case, the research that had been done by Clarice Feld was so extensive and you know, he had like mountains of research. I mean, there's not only these pictures, you know, there's like a zillion documents and train schedules. And I mean, there was just like a mountain of stuff to go through and it seemed like a way, you know, sometimes, you know, to show more, you have to show less. And so, you know, I think before my problem was it's like, how do you deal with the murder of, you know, millions of millions of people? I mean, and it wasn't only Jews. I mean, you know, there were gypsies, homosexuals, there were political dissidents. I mean, you know, millions of other people, you know, were sent to the concentration camps too. And so, you know, it just became, it was just like, I think I was just like overwhelmed and this became an entrance way to take one thing and take something small and tell a bigger story using a smaller group of people. I mean, so, you know, it's not that I was particularly, you know, picking on the French or any other group. I mean, because you can see, I mean, this, you know, it's human behavior that we're seeing. I mean, it's not unfortunately relegated, you know, to one country or to one group of people. Although I did notice in looking at the exhibit today with Dr. Berry that in one of the frames, if you'd call it that, there are not faces, but instead it's a list of names of children who were deported and you focus in on the name Hirsch. Yeah. Your name. And I'm assuming that was intentional. Yeah. And now we're back in your family. Yeah. Yeah, those were, yeah, some, yeah, there's a number of family connections and I did, you know, put those in there intentionally because I went, you know, doing the research, I did look through all the documents and, and you know, and it was like, you know, and it's like I found that, you know, and I had talked to my mom about it too, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to see, you know, like what the connections, you know, might be. But yeah, those were some of the names that were, you know, connected to, you know, my family tree. Okay, thank you. I said, thank you very much. When I, when I looked at the display of everything, one of the things that struck me was the level of detail that was put into recreating the boxcars and the ephemerality of the pictures of the children inside the boxcars with the absolute hardness and the structure of what those cars looked like. And I was wondering what your thoughts are about how you reached that idea to put those boxcars like that. Well, I think you, you really kind of got it. I mean, the, I had mentioned earlier my dad was an industrial designer and I grew up as kind of, you know, a child servant. And I worked for my dad. He did pay me, which was nice. But I mean, I learned about model making, you know, as a kid. And so, you know, the boxcar, I thought would just be a very appropriate symbol. And at one point in the early research, I wanted to actually do it in one of the remaining boxcars. There are a number of them in the United States. And I approached every place in the States that has a boxcar. None of them would let me do it. So I made my own boxcars. And I did it with the help of two other model makers. I mean, because, you know, these things take a long time, you know, to make. And I had also mentioned earlier, through another model maker in Paris, we got the actual blueprints of the boxcars that the French National Railroad used. So we worked from the actual blueprints and then just scaled them down. And the trick was that I didn't wanna build, I mean, model makers become totally obsessed. And I mean, if you get a good model maker, I mean, they will like recreate it, you know, down to the hair. And I had to like kind of pull the reins in. There, because I wanted the boxcar, I mean, to be a psychological frame. And I didn't want the boxcar to become such, you know, the object itself. I mean, so there was that balance during that whole time, you know, because like with these other two guys I was working with, I mean, I made them take stuff off because it's like it's too real. And then that also led me, if you look like the bottom of the cars are done photographically, which also then is intentional because these guys would have been happy to make the wheels and you know, they would have made the tracks, the, you know, it's just like, there'd be no stopping them. But you know, to act as a vehicle to create the juxtaposition that you very eloquently described is kind of really what I was after, you know, it was that balance, you know, between, you know, the roughness of the car and the ephemeral passing, you know, nature of all these children. I wanna thank you, Bob, so much for being with us. Well thank you for having me. And I wanna thank all of you for being here tonight. I just have two brief announcements to make before you all go. First, there is a catalog of the exhibition, which includes a substantial article essay on antisemitism by Dr. Patricia Berry and the catalog is for sale in the back for $10. I also wanna encourage you to come to as many Bennett Center for Judaic Studies events this semester as you can. And we have one that is actually not on the sheet of paper. It's something that really just fell in our lap. A few years ago, we had here at Fairfield, author, historian and playwright Ann Nelson, who talked about her book, Red Orchestra. I don't know if any adults in the audience were there for that. Red Orchestra was a group of German Christian resisters who helped Jews get out of Germany during World War II. Last year, Ann published a sequel to Red Orchestra. It's called Suzanne's Children, how an underground network of Catholics, Protestants and Jews defied the Nazis in Paris and saved 500 children from Auschwitz. After hearing about Bob Hirsch's exhibit and that he was giving a lecture here tonight, Ann wrote to me about a week and a half ago and said she would love to come up to Fairfield. She lives in Manhattan. And to give kind of a second companion lecture to the exhibit. So Bob's installation is unbelievably haunting, chilling, devastating as were the images this evening. Your installation tells us about the children who died. Ann Nelson will be here to talk about some of the children who lived, including 63 French children who were rescued. Her word is kidnapped by this group of resisters as they were being deported to Auschwitz. So that's gonna be exactly two weeks from today, February 20th. The lecture is at five in the afternoon, 5 p.m., over in the black box at the Quick Center. So before Ann Nelson's lecture, Bob Hirsch's installation will be open for viewing in the Walsh Gallery. Usually it's 12 to four, but that day it'll be from 12 to five. And Patricia Berry, hopefully you remember, Patricia promised to actually be the installation between four and five. Again, on Wednesday, February 20th, to answer questions, to take any of you around who would like to see the installation. And again, 5 p.m., we'll try to do some kind of e-blast or something. But we hope as many of you as possible can join us. Again, my deepest thanks to Bob Hirsch. This was incredible, thank you.