Community Events

"Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" is an exhibition from the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., presented by the New College Library Association (NCLA) and (AJC) American Jewish Committee. For Americans, the iconography of Nazism is found in the swastika, the jackboot and the Nazi banner. But another symbol – flames and fire – accompanied the Third Reich from its strident inception to its apocalyptic demise. The exhibit focuses on how a series of book burnings, initiated by German university students on May 10, 1933, became a powerful symbol during World War II, prompting counter demonstrations in New York and other American cities. Many American writers’ books were burned as well, including Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller and Jack London. Ironically, among those books targeted for destruction were the works of Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1822 penned the prophetic words, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”

Open during library hours (http://libguides.ncf.edu/hours).