Public Speaker

Through Unsilence, I design and deliver keynotes, workshops, trainings, and interactive lectures for schools, museums, universities, communities, corporations, and congregations. Below are some examples of workshop and lecture topics. Please get in touch.

Holocaust Memory & Education

ACCIDENTAL HOLOCAUST FICTION
​The unexpected process of writing my young adult historical novel TRAIN.

GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ
​How hidden stories of my grandfather's past led me to break a childhood promise.

HOLOCAUST TIME TRAVEL?
​The dos and don'ts of Holocaust education.

WITHOUT WITNESSES
​​The inheritance of traumatic memory, facing possible futures of Holocaust
education, ​and addressing Holocaust denial.

OVERLAPPING TRIANGLES, COMMON GRAVES
​How to integrate meaningfully and appropriately the non-Jewish victims of Nazism
alongside and within the Jewish narrative of Holocaust history and commemoration.
​For more information on this program, visit Unsilence.

MIS-REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST
​Common misconceptions about Holocaust history and their implications for
​Holocaust pedagogy.

MICKEY MOUSE & THE HOLOCAUST
​The contemporary relevance of Holocaust history and the complexities of the
​victim-rescuer-perpetrator paradigm.

LADY GAGA & THE PINK TRIANGLE
​The history and collective memory of the Nazis' persecution of homosexuals.

LAUGHING AT THE HOLOCAUST
​Holocaust humor and our emotional responses to violent histories.

Human Rights, Social Justice & Genocide Education

UNSILENCING HIDDEN STORIES
Why and how do certain narratives of human rights and social justice become silenced?
And how can we unsilence them?

TEACHING ATROCITY
​Appropriate and inappropriate pedagogies for teaching about atrocity, human
suffering, ​and mass violence.

A WAR OF WORDS: WRITING ABOUT VIOLENCE
The goals, pitfalls, and challenges of writing about extreme violence, mass-murder, atrocity,
​and traumatic memory. The problems and power of human rights fiction.

DESIGNING THE MUSEUM OF VIOLENT ART
​The dos and don'ts of Holocaust and genocide museum design.

TRAUMA & MEMORY
​The tensions and relationships between individual trauma, collective trauma, and
​social memory.

Design & Community Building

HIDDEN STORIES
​Why and how do we intentionally suppress and accidentally forget certain personal and collective narratives? Why do we construct taboos? And, when we break taboos, what happens to our personal identities and our relationships with each other and with the world?

GOAL-CENTERED DESIGN
​How to develop effective distal and incremental goals by using "backwards design"
​and participant perspectives.

IDENTITY & DESIGN
​How to create youth and community programs that are highly engaging, learner-centered,
​and focused on identity development.

RECRUIT, RETAIN & MOTIVATE
​Focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to recruit and retain program participants
​and program staff.

VIRTUAL Vs. PHYSICAL SPACES
​The benefits and challenges of online and in-person community programming and the
​relationship between them.