Kalah Karloff ’20, the 2020-2021 Gideon Klein Scholar, presented her project “Music and the Holocaust: We Made Music in Hell” online on April 5, part of the 2021 Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Week at Northeastern University. It was accompanied by a second presentation by Professor Emeritus Joshua Jacobson, “Music and the Holocaust: A Retrospective on the Gideon Klein Award.” Karloff’s presentation can be seen here.
Karloff researched how music was used as a form of torture by the Nazis in concentration camps and how the effect of music on the human body can change with its context. She recently wrote about her project for our Jewish Studies blog: On Composing “Music and the Holocaust: ‘We Made Music in Hell’”. Her research paper and the accompanying video collage of musical examples entitled Musical Selections from Music and the Holocaust: “We Made Music in Hell” is available through the University Library Digital Repository Service. Kalah Karloff graduated from Northeastern in December 2020 with a degree in Communications, Music Industry, and Media Production.
Last year’s Gideon Klein project was presented online in September 2020. 2019-2020 Gideon Klein Scholar Yael Sheinfeld ’21 prepared an original animated film based on the children’s story The Children’s Tree of Terezin. The event, postponed from March, also featured a second student presentation, Jessie Sigler ’20’s capstone project for her Jewish Studies minor, which involved making the survivor testimonies archived at Northeastern more accessible and more searchable. Yael’s film and the presentation of both student projects are now part of the Holocaust Awareness Archive at Northeastern University and can be found here.
