Arts and Events Calendar

Can there be, as philosopher Theodor Adorno declared, “no poetry after Auschwitz”? Or is it possible for artists to hold up a lens to unimaginable horrors, and help us move through the heartbreak of history into a new realm, where we can transform the present? This event features a performance of Next Year in Jerusalem, a powerful new piece created by two USC faculty artists, Stacie Chaiken (Theatre) and Brighde Mullins (Master of Professional Writing).

Chaiken’s performance will be followed by a conversation about the nature of testimony, its relationship to creative expression, and the power of art to convey what cannot be spoken.

Chaiken and Mullins created Next Year in Jerusalem based on materials from the recently acquired USC Libraries’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection, which includes journals, photographs and firsthand testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the World War II genocide.

Visiting scholar and fiction writer R. Clifton Spargo will facilitate the post-show panel discussion with Chaiken and Mullins, Brent Blair (Theatre), Wolf Gruner (Jewish Studies and History), filmmaker Gabor Kalman, and Stephen Smith of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

Related Event

Friday, April 15, 12 p.m. Forum for Creative Writers with R. Clifton Spargo
Doheny Memorial Library, Intellectual Commons, Room 233
Join Spargo for a conversation about testimony — or the first-person reporting of events — and the ways in which it can inform artistic expression. His story Anne, Afterward and Next Year in Jerusalem will be available at www.usc.edu/libraries/about/programs_exhibitions/events/nextyearinjerusalem. After the forum, join us for a visit to the USC Libraries’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies Collection in Doheny Library. Admission is free. Refreshments will be served.

Organized by Wolf Gruner (Jewish Studies and History) and Lynn Sipe (USC Libraries).