2024 Guests

Thomas Doherty
May 15 The Plot Against Harry
Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University since 1990, is a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema who has also taught and lectured overseas as a Fulbright scholar. In 2005, he received recognition as an Academy Film Scholar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Doherty is the author of a bookshelf of outstanding books, including Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s; Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II; Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934; Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture; Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, and Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939; Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC & the Birth of the Blacklist. His most recent book is Little Lindy is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century.
Read more about Thomas Doherty.

Laura Jockusch
May 19 Stella. A Life.
May 19 Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer
Laura Jockusch is Albert Abramson Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. Professor Jockusch’s research and teaching interests include Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and the history of Holocaust survivors and the rebuilding of Jewish life in the postwar era. She is on the editorial board of Revue d’histoire de la Shoah and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry and a member of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is the winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize. Her recent research examines Jewish conceptions of retributive justice after the Holocaust, Jewish involvement in Nazi war crime trials, and manifestations of revenge during and after the Holocaust — topics about which she has published several books, including Jewish Honor Courts, and Revenge, Retribution, Reconciliation: Justice and Emotions Between Conflict and Meditation. Her current project is a book about Stella Goldschlag, the subject of the film Stella. A Life.

Karin Oehlenschlaeger
May 19 Stella. A Life.
Karin Oehlenschläger is a cultural program curator at the Goethe-Institut Boston and has been curating the German Film Series at the Coolidge for thirteen years. She’s been with the Goethe-Institut since 2005 and is responsible for film, literature and political programs. She holds an MA in German Literature and Communications from Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Shulamit Reinharz
May 21 Seven Blessings
Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brandeis University, and the author, co-author or editor of 14 books, including The J Girls’ Guide; Feminist Methods in Social Research; Today I am a Woman; American Jewish Women and the Zionist Enterprise; One Hundred Years of Kibbutz Life; Observing the Observer; and a book in Hebrew about Manya Wilbushevitz Shohat. For 10 years, she directed the Women’s Studies Program at Brandeis, where she created a graduate degree program including a Joint M.A. in Jewish Women’s Studies. In 1997, she founded the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute whose purpose is to develop new ways of thinking about Jews and Gender internationally. As part of that experience, she founded the English-language academic journal, Nashim, in partnership with the Schechter Seminary in Jerusalem. In 2001, she created the Women’s Studies Research Center, which includes the Kniznick Gallery for Feminist Art and the Holocaust Research Study Group. In 2017. Professor Reinharz’s most recent book is 100 Jewish Brides Stories from Around the World (2024) which she edited with Barbara Vinick. In June, her newest book Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir will be published.

Lisa Rivo
May 12 Mothers of Today
+ Festival Co-Director
Lisa Rivo is Co-Director of The National Center for Jewish Film. Founded in 1976, NCJF owns one of the world’s largest archives of Jewish-content films. The Center, which rescues, restores and makes available rare archival films, also distributes the work of contemporary filmmakers and has a dozen new films being produced under its aegis. She oversees the Center’s programmatic, distribution, curatorial and exhibition activities. Lisa has co-directed and co-curated 17 Boston-area film festivals and has curated other series worldwide. Ms. Rivo consults regularly with filmmakers, scholars, and curators, and has sat on numerous film festival juries. She has a degree in Art History from Vassar College and focused on American visual culture and film at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts PhD program. Lisa worked in the film program of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and as Director of Public Information at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Prior to joining NCJF in 2006, she was a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Associate Director & Senior Writer of the African American National Biography, an encyclopedia edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Sharon Pucker Rivo
May 12 Mothers of Today
+ Festival Co-Director
Sharon Pucker Rivo, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The National Center for Jewish Film, has been a leading force in the field of Jewish film and culture for more than five decades through her work as a curator, programmer, archivist, film distributor, film and television producer, and academic. In the mid-1970s she and co-founder Miriam Krant rescued a languishing collection of Yiddish-language feature films. Today, NCJF is the largest archive of Jewish film outside of Israel, and a major distributor of restored classic and new independent Jewish-content films. Ms. Rivo was an early advocate for the inclusion of film in the study of history and culture and for the historically accurate use of visual materials. She has worked with hundreds of filmmakers around the world as a consultant and has appeared as an expert in many documentaries and television programs. She has curated film programs for venues from Boston to Beijing, including co-curating the first ever retrospective of Yiddish cinema, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ms. Rivo has been a member of Brandeis University faculty for more than thirty years and she lectures widely on the history of Jews in cinema, a field she helped pioneer. Internationally recognized as an authority on Jewish and Yiddish film, film archiving and restoration, and Jewish programming and distribution, she lectures and has served on numerous international film festival juries.