Erosion of Civil Society: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Monday, June 30 - Tuesday, July 1, 2025
9:00am-3:30pm via Zoom
Topics Covered:
- The rapid transition from democracy to dictatorship under Hitler
- The mis/use of propaganda
- Antisemitism then and now
- The role of the press, free and censored
What to Expect from MTI:
- FREE dynamic training program
- Historical analysis
- Pedagogical training
- Peer teacher network
- 12 hours of continuing education credits
Contact:
Website: BildnerCenter.rutgers.edu
Presenters
Peter Adams is senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project (NLP), a national education nonprofit that advances the development and teaching of news literacy in K-12 education. Since joining NLP in 2009, he has served as the organization's head of education and Chicago program manager; coordinated classroom and after-school programs; developed organizational strategy and the NLP’s digital program; and provided news literacy training and workshops to educators. He began his career as a classroom teacher in the New York City schools through Teach for America. He has also taught in the Chicago public schools, at Roosevelt University, and at Chicago City Colleges’ Wilbur Wright campus. In addition, he has worked with the NYC Teaching Fellows program, with After School Matters, and as an independent education consultant.
Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, is the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (Yale, 2001) and The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton, 2016), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” His most recent book is Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020 (Twelve/Hachette, 2020). In addition, Douglas has published two novels, The Catastrophist (2007), a Kirkus “Best Books of the Year,” and The Vices (2011), a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. His commentary and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times; and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian (US), where he is a contributing opinion writer.
Samuel D. Kassow, the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, is a leading historian of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust. He was on the team of scholars that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and was also among a select group of historians chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one-volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. Kassow’s publications include a translation of Rokhl Auerbach’s Warsaw Testament (White Goat Press, 2024), winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Memoir, and Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and translated into eight languages. Along with David G. Roskies, Kassow edited volume 9 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization Series, Catastrophe and Rebirth, 1939–1973 (Yale University Press, 2020). A child of Holocaust survivors, Kassow spent his earliest years in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.
Colleen Tambuscio has served as the pedagogical consultant to the MTI for more than twelve years. She is a long time special education and regular education teacher and a leading voice in Holocaust education, both in New Jersey and nationally. She is the founder and president of the Council of Holocaust Educators, a statewide professional development organization, and an educational consultant to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education. She established a Holocaust education curriculum at New Milford High School, which now includes two elective classes: “The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Behavior” and “Contemporary Genocide: A Call to Action.” Tambuscio was honored by Princeton University and the New Milford Educational Foundation. In 1998, she was named a Mandel Fellow to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and continues to serve as a USHMM regional educator.