October 25 | 2 – 3:30pm
Join us for the closing program of Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis. Artists Jason Langer and Andrea Stolowitz will present a powerful dialogue confronting the intergenerational imprint of the Holocaust and the ways art can bear witness, heal, and inspire. Photographer Jason Langer, whose moody, cinematic images of Berlin anchor the exhibition, joins OJMCHE Playwright-in-Residence Andrea Stolowitz, award-winning playwright and librettist, for a conversation on memory, place, and artistic reckoning. Scholar Katja Garloff, Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College, will moderate the discussion, providing literary and cultural context.
Visitors are encouraged to experience Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis and/or listen to the audio drama of Stolowitz’s play, The Berlin Diaries (provided upon registration) prior to the program. However, all are welcome, and advance preparation is not required to participate in the program.
About the Panelists
- Andrea Stolowitz is an internationally produced playwright and librettist and a dual US/German citizen (reclaimed from her Jewish ancestry). Andrea splits her time between New York, Portland, Berlin, and Ireland. Andrea is a three-time winner of the Oregon Book Award in drama. Her plays have been developed and presented nationally and internationally at theaters such as The Long Wharf, The Old Globe, The Cherry Lane, and New York Stage and Film. The LA Times calls her work “heartbreaking” and the Orange County Register characterizes her approach as a “brave refusal to sugarcoat issues and tough decisions.” Andrea’s work aims to use storytelling as the medium for deeper social understanding.
- Born in 1967 in Tucson, Arizona, photographer Jason Langer makes work underpinned by Buddhist philosophy. Graduating with a BA in Photography from the University of Oregon in 1989, his first major project, Shadow, explored existential ideas relating to the fragility of the human body. Langer taught photography for the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, for more than a decade, and currently teaches for Santa Fe Workshops, Medium San Diego and is a faculty member of Photo Phlo. He lives in Portland, Oregon and is currently working on two projects – Stumptown Portraits and Samsara: the Wheel of Life and Transcendence, which reflects the Buddhist cycle of birth, death, and rebirth following his father’s passing in 2019.
- Katja Garloff is the Moe and Izetta Tonkon Professor of German Studies, Jewish Studies, and Humanities at Reed College, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary German literature, German Jewish culture, and film and media studies. She is the author of Words from Abroad: Trauma and Displacement in Postwar German Jewish Writers (2005), Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture (2016). Her most recent book, titled Making German Jewish Literature Anew: Authorship, Memory, and Place (2022), charts the reemergence of a Jewish literature in contemporary Germany and Austria. Garloff has been the recipient of many research grants, including from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She presently serves on the editorial boards of Humanities, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, and Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies.