Recent Blog Posts

Experiences of Polish Antisemitism in the Holocaust and Polish Reflections about the Holocaust Today

           

(The funeral for the victims of the Kiecle Pogrom, Poland 1946)

                  Throughout my internship at the Holocaust Education Center, I have seen survival testimonials across Europe. One of the most common countries where people came from was Poland. Poland lost more of its Jewish population than any other country in Europe as 90% of the country’s Jewish population was killed. Through analyzing the testimonies I came upon the realization that while Poland was a victim of the German invasion of the Nazis, many Poles were not opposed to antisemitic beliefs of the Nazis. There are large instances of how antisemiticism persisted directly after the Holocaust such as the Kielce Pogrom of July 4, 1946, but I also saw Polish antisemitism in the survivor testimonials I viewed such as Sam Krongold, Chana Konopiski and Roman Zieglar.

By Matthew Halsall

Why do people study abroad?

Cansu Aydemir
March 11th, 2019
 

                                                                                                             image credit: https://www.iesabroad.org/study-abroad/blogs/adennis3babsonedu/stigma-st...

The one thing that I know is that being an international student is definitely not easy. Living apart from family, friends and the culture that one brought up with is just hard. Then why thousands of students leave their home to get an education in a different country?

3 Complications with Teaching Children’s Classes at a Museum

A (bad) picture of one of the digital catalog information entries for an item belonging to the grade 7 history collection before I updated. Property of the ROM Learning Dept.

With my internship at the Royal Ontario Museum almost over, I want to reflect on some things I’ve noticed about museum education, specifically, teaching humanities classes to children. While I have never gotten to teach a class, I have seen them happening, have helped set them up and put them away, and have helped create information for teaching the curriculum. 

Written by: Shawna Quigley
Date posted: March 11, 2019

Five tips to organize your massive research project

Research material, photo by Jazz DiMauro

Research material, photo by Jazz DiMauro

By Nico Mara-McKay

One of the major projects I'm working on at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives is a digital exhibition that will highlight the material the archives has regarding genderqueer and other gender identities beyond the binary of female or male. 

It's a large project and it hadn't been done before, let alone attempted by an undergraduate student. It was a bit of a learning curve, but it provided an opportunity to pick up new skills as I went, and I'd like to share some of the strategies I've been using to both discover material and organize the data I found.

Saddening Aspects of Holocaust Survivor Testimonies and Three Ways I Cope with Emotional Testimonies

The sole question I was asked at my PechaKucha presentation about was about how I cope in watching painful and emotional testimonies of survivors. After further consideration,  I felt I could expound upon my answer about what specifically makes these testimonies sad and how I cope with this sadness.  

How do I create stories?

Hello! As you already know, I am working with U of T News and I am creating stories on international students at U of T for my first project. In this blog-post I’d like to share the process- starting from how I find the students to how I made short stories out of the things that I gather from the interviews.

By Cansu Aydemir

Published on: January 28th, 2019

Volkswagen: Das Not Just Auto

Hitler examining a Volkswagen on April 20, 1938.

Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest car manufacturers, has not always been the beloved company we know and love. While researching World War 2 German gas masks as an intern at the Royal Ontario Museum, I’ve found some particularly interesting information about current brands and companies and their connection to Nazi Germany.

Written by: Shawna Quigley
Date posted: January 28, 2019

What Role do the Arts have to Play in Environmental Activism?

©2018 Robert Burtynsky (Art Gallery of Ontario)
A riveting photo of a still from the Anthropocene film, which also figured prominently in the AGO’s exhibition, depicting a mass-burning of elephant tusks in Kenya as a retaliatory political statement to the epidemic of elephant poaching.

What role do the arts have to play in the facilitation of a dialogue aimed at raising awareness towards the severity of the world's current environmental state?

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