Panel Presentation:
• Breaking Cycles of Violence through Holocaust Education & the Arts
Panelists: Bernie Furshpan, Jud Newborn, Jakob Fiscus, and Bill Tinglin
(120 min)

Abstract:

Holocaust education is often approached primarily as a moral mandate: “never again.” This panel proposes a complementary psychohistorical framing: Holocaust education and the arts can function as societal instruments of repair, helping communities metabolize collective trauma and interrupt the repetitive psychological mechanisms that sustain cycles of violence. In psychohistorical terms, large-scale atrocities leave behind more than historical facts; they generate enduring emotional residues — fear, dissociation, scapegoating, group idealization, and defensive denial — that can be transmitted across generations and reactivated in times of social fracture.

Drawing on museum scholarship, film and animation, survivor/family testimony, and innovative educational methodology, the panel explores how narrative forms — especially visual storytelling and arts-based pedagogy — can expand empathic imagination without sentimentalizing horror and can preserve moral clarity without collapsing into propaganda. We examine how creative works emerging from Holocaust memory (including projects rooted in Terezin, postwar silence, and contemporary antisemitic violence) can support reflective witnessing, ethical containment, and meaning-making in audiences of different ages and backgrounds.

Rather than treating remembrance as repetition, the panel emphasizes remembrance as integration: a disciplined engagement with traumatic history that strengthens psychological resilience, civic responsibility, and the capacity to recognize early warning signs of dehumanization. Ultimately, the panel argues that Holocaust education — when paired with art, testimony, and thoughtfully structured learning — can help individuals and groups move from immobilization to insight, and from inherited terror to deliberate moral agency.

Keywords: antisemitism, arts-based pedagogy, collective trauma, Holocaust education, moral agency, psychohistory, testimony, visual storytelling

Short Bios:

Jud Newborn is Founding Historian Emeritus of NY’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. His is co-producer of Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest – an intergenerational, award-winning animated short film about child survivor, and later actress, Ingrid Pitt. https://vimeo.com/29856585  He is also co-producer of Hidden Light, an animated short in process about a boy artist in Terezin.  Author of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose <https://bit.ly/4coAW1d> he was honored by the Anne Frank Center with their Spirit of Anne Frank Award. He has published extensively and presented his multimedia storytelling lecture programs at the UN and internationally. He is also the two-time Emmy Award-winning Producer of Special Programs for LI’s Cinema Arts Centre. For more information, visit http://www.judnewborn.com.

Bernie Furshpan (2G) is a marketing, public relations & media consultant at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County (HMTC). Dr. Furshpan is a producer of the award-winning film, The Weight of Memory: I Am Bernie Furshpan, to be shown on PBS. For more information, visit https://iambernie.com/ or .

Bill Tinglin is the author of an innovative textbook, Humanity’s Darkest Hours: True Story of the Holocaust. For more information, visit https://billtingling.com/ and https://vimeo.com/1046465495. Bill Tinglin’s book celebration conference was organized in April 2025 (EASAPP was a co-sponsor), and the information about it and the excerpts of the recordings are available on the web at https://mindmendmedia.com/4-6-25-humanitys-darkest-hour-true-story-of-the-holocaust-by-bill-tinglin/#reg. Bill is currently working on the ten-part cinematic and book series, a journey from ignorance to insight: The Trilogy “The Vault Blitzkrieg.”