On a Fulbright Fellowship in Lithuania in 2010, Toronto native Menachem Kaiser traveled to Poland and there, in the village of Sosnowiec, he was inspired to take up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather’s former battle to reclaim the family’s apartment building. His encounters with long-time residents of the building and with a Polish lawyer known as “The Killer” are intwined with a surprise discovery of a cousin’s secret memoir revered by a band of Silesian treasure seekers who believe it is an indispensable guidebook to Nazi plunder. Don’t miss hearing about Kaiser’s extraordinary journey and exploration of the many issues surrounding inheritance, legacy, and family history. Hosted by the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors.

Menachem Kaiser holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and was a Fulbright Fellow to Lithuania. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, New York, and elsewhere.

Dr. Bernice Lerner is author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and a senior scholar at Boston University's Center for Character and Social Responsibility.

The fascinating and crucial stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women’s rights movement, and the Civil War – told from the perspective of three remarkable and impactful women.

Join us to hear the story of the “agitators,” three friends and neighbors in Auburn, New York, at the forefront of cultural change during the Civil War years. Harriet Tubman was one of the most important conductors on the underground railroad. Martha Wright, Quaker mother of seven, and Frances Seward, wife of Governor, then Senator, then Secretary of State William H. Seward, were fellow agitators, hiding enslaved men, women, and children rescued by Tubman in their basement kitchens. Through these women’s richly detailed and intimate letters, Dorothy Wickenden brings to life their remarkable work, including their personal and political intersections with Lincoln, Seward, Daniel Webster, Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Lloyd Garrison. Don’t missing hearing about The Agitators and this extraordinary period of American history.

Dorothy Wickenden is executive editor of The New Yorker, where she is also a writer and moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she was previously national affairs editor at Newsweek and executive editor at The New Republic. She is the author of Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West.

S.C. Gwynne is the author of Hymns of the Republic and the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a journalist, he has worked at Time as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor; and at Texas Monthly as executive editor.