Dean Cycon’s debut novel, Finding Home (Hungary, 1945), explores the complex emotional, moral, and economic dynamics facing Jewish concentration camp survivors trying to return to their hometowns after liberation. As the six surviving Jews of Laszlo, Hungary, return home, they seek to restart their lives while struggling to face their former neighbors and friends who became perpetrators, enablers, and bystanders. Their loved ones were all murdered, and their spirits and bodies were brutalized in Auschwitz. Still, they retain the hope of recapturing a semblance of normalcy in the town they called home—only to discover that everything they once possessed has

Join Anita Norich at the Yiddish Book Center for a conversation about her recently released translation of Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin’s Desires (White Goat Press). In Desires, as in much of her work, Dropkin reflects on the complexities of love, eroticism, and domesticity. Through characters carefully drawn from her own immigrant experience, Dropkin addresses the yearnings of both the body and mind, the tension between excitement and security, and the conflicting impulses that are part of the human condition.  Anita Norich will be in conversation with Lisa Newman, the Yiddish Book Center’s Director of Publishing and Public Programs. Following their

Join us for the final conversation of our Reflections on Democracy series as we explore the topic of Democracy, Education & The Arts. On Thursday, September 19th, The Du Bois Freedom Center will welcome Tony and Grammy award-winning artist and author, Leslie Odom, Jr., who will be in conversation with our Visiting Scholar on Democracy, The Honorable Reverend Michael Blake. This program is free, open to the public, and all are welcome to attend. Advance registration required by August 30th.

On January 3, 1911, two Latvian anarchists wanted for a police murder were tracked down to a room on Sidney Street in London’s overwhelmingly Jewish East End. For six hours, the two besieged men, equipped with semiautomatic pistols, held out against the police and army sharpshooters. Winston Churchill, then Britain’s interior minister, came to the scene, peering out from a doorway to see the action for himself. The two gunmen died, but the shootout—unparalleled in London’s history—entered folklore as “the siege of Sidney Street.”   In this illustrated talk, historian Andrew Whitehead—author of the recently published A Devilish Kind of Courage: