Literary: Learning Through Literature

Alan Zweibel has made a career of helping funny people be funnier. His long and successful career started by selling jokes for $7 a-piece to the last of the Borscht Belt standups, to being one of the original Saturday Night Live writers working with SNL greats such as Gilda Radner and John Belushi to having a hand in such landmark shows as It’s the Garry Shandling Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In his memoir, Laugh Lines, Alan weaves together his own stories and interviews with his friends and contemporaries including Richard Lewis, Bob Saget, Carl Reiner and more.

Co-hosted by 5400 Club

Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death is a compelling biography of the infamous Nazi doctor and a gripping narrative of the quest to bring him to justice. David G. Marwell, historian and former Justice Department of Special Investigations official who was tasked with uncovering Josef Mengele’s fate in the 1980’s, draws from new sources to deliver a richly detailed work that dispels many of the myths obscuring the physician’s identity.

David G. Marwell has served as Director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and Associate Museum Director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

Co-hosted by Jewish Woman’s Club

In 1945, Dr. Hannah Weiss, an Austrian-Jewish physicist, is removed from her essential work with the Critical Assemblies Team at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and is taken for interrogation. Is Hannah a Nazi spy or is she protecting a far more personal and dark secret of her own? Hannah’s War is a vivid, page-turning, and inspiring re-imagination of the final months of World War II, and the brilliant researchers behind the first atomic bomb. This unforgettable love story about an exceptional woman and the dangerous power of her greatest discovery.

Jan Eliasberg is an award-winning writer and director. Her directing career includes dramatic pilots for Miami Vice and Wiseguy, countless episodes of television series including Nashville, Parenthood, Blue Bloods, NCIS: Los Angeles and many more.

Presented in partnership with Simon Family JCC and Pozez Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia

Wandering Dixie is an exploration of the history of Jewish southerners as it converges with the region’s complex, conflicted present. Author, Sue Eisenfeld visits small southern towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived and, in the process, discovers the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine.

Sue Eisenfeld is a literary-nonfiction writer who weaves together history, nature, travel/adventure, culture and personal stories. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Forward, Washingtonian and many other publications.