Learn about the Museum’s newest exhibition Speaking Up! Confronting Hate Speech, which underscores the power of words to lead to discrimination, persecution, and mass violence. Identity-based violence like genocide is rarely—if ever—a spontaneous event. The exhibition provides historical and current examples of the connection between words and mass atrocities, while empowering visitors with strategies to counter hate speech in their own communities.

Members of the exhibition’s original curatorial team Leora Kahn and David J. Simon will be in conversation with Treva Walsh, Associate Curator at the Museum, about the process of curating the exhibition at Holocaust Museum Houston and their reasons for bringing it to the Museum of Jewish Heritage as part of a multi-faceted educational initiative to combat antisemitism today.

David J. Simon is a Senior Lecturer and the Assistant Dean for Graduate Education at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. He also serves as the Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale, through which he co-founded the Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era initiative. His research focuses on atrocity prevention and the politics of recovery from mass atrocities, paying particular attention to lessons that can be learned from the experiences in Rwanda with respect to both issues. He co-edited Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age: Memorialization Unmoored (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020, with Eve M. Zucker), and The Handbook of Genocide Studies (Edward Elgar, 2023, with Leora Kahn). A graduate of Princeton University, he holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Leora Kahn is the executive director of PROOF: Media for Social Justice,a non-profit that uses visual storytelling for social change. Her latest exhibit on Hate Speech opened at Houston Museum of Houston this year. Leora was a fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, where she conducted research on rescuers and rescuing behavior in Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia, Sri Lanka and Iraq. A former Fulbright Senior Specialist, she is a human rights lecturer at the University of Dayton, where she founded the moral courage program. Leora is a research scholar at Clark University, where she works on projects that center on the ethics of representation, focusing on the refugees and forced migrants.

Treva Walsh is the Associate Curator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and organized the Museum’s presentation of Speaking Up! Confronting Hate Speech in 2024. She specializes in oral history and multimedia storytelling of the 20th century. Most recently, Walsh curated the landmark exhibition Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark (2023), which uses cutting-edge audiovisual technology to present Holocaust history to new audiences. She has contributed curatorially to numerous exhibitions, including Ordinary Treasures: Highlights from the Collection (2019), Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away. (2019), Rendering Witness: Holocaust-Era Art as Testimony (2020), and The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do (2022), for which she curated and managed the production of all audiovisual components. Previously, Walsh managed the archival processing team at The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive. She was also a core member of the audiovisual archiving group XFR Collective, which partners with artists and activists to migrate late 20th century video art and documentary footage from at-risk media formats to digitally accessible platforms.

Speaking Up! Confronting Hate Speech is curated by Holocaust Museum Houston in partnership with Leora Kahn, Ph.D.; PROOF: Media for Social Justice; David J. Simon, Director, Genocide Studies Program, Yale University; and the Genocide Center in Johannesburg, South Africa.
This presentation is organized by Treva Walsh, Associate Curator.

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