Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a performance and reading of Robin Hirsch’s powerful essay “Germany Through My Jewish Eyes” by its author, followed by a conversation between Robin Hirsch and Carol Strauss, the former Executive Director of the Leo Baeck Institute, to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In one of those serendipitous encounters that seemed to happen regularly at the Cornelia Street Café, Robin Hirsch was invited to Berlin, the city in which both his parents had been born and lived full and productive lives until …He was asked to perform from his memoir, Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski, and to deliver a lecture, Germany Through My Jewish Eyes. You will be asked to transport yourself back to the Berlin of almost three decades ago as, in a (then) recently re-unified city, Robin travels even further back in time … To quote from the beginning of “Germany Through My Jewish Eyes”: “It is with a very complicated mixture of feelings that I presume to speak today. I am only too aware of the reams of scholarship that have accumulated on the subject of Germany and the Jews since the end of the Second World War: I am not a scholar. I am only too aware of the overwhelming testimony that has been set down, recorded, collected, filmed by and about survivors, known and unknown, over the last fifty years: I am not a survivor. Mine is a still, small voice crying in the wake of what happened in this city, in this country, on this continent, almost a lifetime ago. I can speak, not with the weight of scholarship, nor with the authenticity of experience, but only in the still, small voice of a child who grew up in the shadow of a terrible, unfathomable history.”

About the participants:

Robin Hirsch is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English-speaking Union Scholar, who has acted, directed, taught, published, and produced on both sides of the Atlantic. He was born in London during the Blitz, the son of German Jews who had fled Hitler. This complex history informs much of his work both as a writer and as a performer. He is the author of Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History (UPNE, 1995; paper, 1996), for which he received two NYFA Fellowships and the Robert and Adele S. Blank Jewish Arts Award. He is also the author, with the collaboration and interference of his children, of FEG: Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children (Little, Brown, 2002). 1n 1977, he founded the New Works Project, a peripatetic experimental theatre company in New York City, which developed more than two hundred new works for the American theatre, including his own acclaimed solo performance cycle, Mosaic: Fragments of a Jewish Life, with which he has toured both the U.S. and Europe. Also in 1977, together with two other artists—Irish-American actor Charles McKenna and Argentinean-Canadian-Italian painter and sculptor Raphaela Pivetta—he opened a tiny one-room café on a tiny one-block street in New York City’s Greenwich Village: the Cornelia Street Café. There, for more than 40 years, in addition to award-winning food and drink, Cornelia presented work by thousands of artists in every conceivable genre. Currently, Robin Hirsch is working on The Whole World Passes Through: Stories from the Cornelia Street Café, volume I of which was published in 2017 to coincide with Cornelia’s 40th birthday. It is at once the biography of a beloved New York institution and the continuing autobiography of its author.

Before leaving the Leo Baeck Institute New York in 2015, Carol Kahn Strauss was its Executive Director for eighteen years, prior to becoming International Director in 2013 in order to open an office in Berlin and expand operations in Germany. Mrs. Strauss holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master’s degree in International Relations from Hunter College. Before her position with the Leo Baeck Institute, she worked as a Senior Editor at the 20th Century Fund in New York, as well as Senior Editor at the Hudson Institute. For many years, she was assistant book editor at the renowned Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In addition to her professional career, Mrs. Strauss commits time to charity and volunteer work. In 2015, she received Germany’s highest civilian honor, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, and the Order of Merit, First Class, of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2005. She was also awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2009. In 2022, Carol Strauss endowed a fellowship in Jewish Studies at the American Academy Berlin.

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 30^th 2024, from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM

Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU; 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY

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