Upcoming Events
Past Events
Newshawks in Berlin, by Larry Heinzerling and Randy Herschaft, with Ann Cooper, reveals how The Associated Press covered Nazi Germany from its earliest days through the aftermath of World War II. Heinzerling and Herschaft accessed previously classified government documents; plumbed diary entries, letters, and memos; and reviewed thousands of published stories and photos to examine what the AP reported and what it left out. Their research uncovers fierce internal debates about how to report in a dictatorship, and it reveals decisions by AP that sometimes prioritized business ambitions over journalistic ethics. The book also documents the AP’s coverage of the Holocaust and its unveiling.
Larry Heinzerling (1945–2021) was a reporter, foreign correspondent, and news executive during a forty-one-year career at The Associated Press. He worked in foreign bureaus in Nigeria, South Africa, and Germany and served as director of AP World Services and deputy international editor.
Randy Herschaft has been an investigative journalist at the AP for three decades.
Ann Cooper, Heinzerling’s wife, worked with Herschaft to complete the book following Heinzerling’s death in 2021. She is professor emerita at the Columbia Journalism School, a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and former NPR bureau chief in Moscow and Johannesburg.
From the Foreword to the book: Newshawks “describes the journalists and their work through a real-time prism….Issues they faced – how to report in a dictatorship, whether to embed with military forces, how to report on accounts of atrocities that cannot be independently verified – these all remain dilemmas for today’s journalists covering war in Ukraine, protests in Iran, dictatorship in Myanmar, or human rights violations in every region of the world.
Moderating the discussion is Andrew Nagorski, a journalist and author who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, serving as bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin.
Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa’s new book The Counterfeit Countess tells the astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg—a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on her own unpublished memoir. Using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat, Mehlberg worked as a welfare official while also serving in the Polish resistance. With guile, cajolery, and steely persistence, the “Countess” persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp. She won permission to deliver food and medicine—even decorated Christmas trees—for thousands more of the camp’s prisoners. At the same time, she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned at Majdanek. Incredibly, she eluded detection, ultimately survived the war, and emigrated to the US.
White and Sliwa will be in conversation about their book with Andrew Nagorski, author of Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.
Dr. Elizabeth “Barry” White recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as historian and as Research Director for the USHMM’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Prior to working for the USHMM, Barry spent a career at the US Department of Justice working on investigations and prosecutions of Nazi criminals and other human rights violators. She served as deputy director and chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations and as deputy chief and chief historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia.
Dr. Joanna Sliwa is a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) in New York, where she also administers academic programs. She previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University and has served as a historical consultant and researcher, including for the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler. Her first book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library. She lives in Linden, New Jersey.
Andrew Nagorski served as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, Moscow, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, and Berlin. He is the author of seven previous critically acclaimed books, including Hitlerland and The Nazi Hunters. He has also written for countless publications.
Chasing the News and Deciphering History
A Lunch and Learn Series on Zoom with the Author - Andrew Nagorski
Virtual Book Event, launch of paperback edition
Made at the Library: “Saving Freud” with Andrew Nagorski
Sponsored by CBI Cultural Programming and Library Committees
Holocaust Memorial Day online lecture with author Andrew Nagorski
International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Americans, Hitler, and the Holocaust
15th International Conference on World War II
Andrew Nagorski in Conversation with George Hammond
“Mengele: Unmasking The Angel Of Death” Book Talk,
in conversation with Nagorski
Thirty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Books
