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U.S. Holocaust Museum Exhibition Comes to USI

Book burning in Opera Square, Berlin, May 10, 1933.

A traveling exhibition offering a look at the first steps the Nazis took to suppress freedom of expression in the 1930s and America's strong response to the suppression will be on display in the David L. Rice Library at the University of Southern Indiana February 10 through Friday, March 19, 2010.

The exhibition, Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings, focuses on how the book burnings became a potent symbol during World War II in America's battle against Nazism, and concludes by examining their continued impact on our public discourse.

The exhibition is on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which organized the material as a traveling exhibit in 2003, 70 years from when Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany.

The Nazi book burnings in the 1930s provoked immediate, strong reactions in the United States among writers, artists, scholars, journalists, librarians, labor unions, clergy, political figures, and others.

Ted Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said "America's response was intense, in fact so strong that throughout the war the government used the book burnings to help define the nature of the enemy to the American public. Unfortunately, the systematic murder of Europe's Jews was not seen as a compelling case for fighting Nazism."

Dr. Michael Slavkin, USI associate professor of education, was instrumental in bringing the exhibition to USI. "The exhibition provides high school and university students with the chance to reflect on what it means to be active in their learning," he said. "Some German students in 1933 took the route of hate and fear, ignoring the importance of differences of opinion in a democracy."

Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings includes images of period documents, along with film, video, and newsreel footage.

The exhibition is made possible by contributions from the Temple Adath B'Nai Israel, the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Community of Scholars Fund, and the USI Bower-Suhrheinrich College of Education and Human Services.

Open to the public and free of charge, the exhibition will be open during
regular library hours.

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