December 2020

William Kinderman is professor of music and the Leo M. Klein and Elaine Krown Klein Chair in Performance Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His many books include Beethoven, Wagner’s “Parsifal” and, most recently, Beethoven. A Political Artist in Revolutinary Times.

Mark Swed has been the classical music critic of the Los Angeles Times since 1996. Before that, he was a music critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Wall Street Journal and has written extensively for international publications. Swed is the author of the book-length text to the best-selling iPad app, The Orchestra and is a former associate editor of the Musical Quarterly.

Sultan Doughan is an anthropologist, who works on questions of citizenship, religious difference, racialization of Jewish and Muslim communities and political equality in contemporary Germany. She is particularly concerned with how genocide commemoration and the question of justice, transitional and racial, intersect and give rise to secular moral and ethical claims in public. Doughan has conducted field research among civil society organizations that were funded to combat Islamic extremism by teaching tolerance through the memory of the Holocaust. Dr. Doughan is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston University.

Rachael Cerrotti is an award-winning documentary photographer, writer, educator and producer. Her work focuses on exploring the intergenerational impact of memory and migration. For over a decade, Rachael has been retracing her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story and documenting the echoes of World War II. In the fall of 2019, she released a narrative podcast about this story titled We Share The Same Sky. It is now being taught in high school classrooms throughout the United States and abroad. Rachael has worked in over a dozen countries and has been published and featured by NPR, PRI’s The World, WBUR, GBH, amongst others and regularly presents to communities and classrooms worldwide. Rachael has a forthcoming memoir set to be published in the fall of 2021 and works as a creative producer with USC Shoah Foundation. She is currently based in Maine.

Mohamed Amjahid was born as the son of so-called guest workers in Frankfurt am Main. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. During his studies, he worked as a journalist for taz, Frankfurter Rundschau and Deutschlandfunk. He has worked as a political reporter for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the Zeit Magazin. Anthropologically and journalistically, he focuses on human rights, equality and upheaval in the US, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mohamed Amjahid is a 2020 Thomas Mann fellow.

Max Czollek completed his doctorate studies at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Since 2009, Czollek has been a member of poetry collective G13, which has published books and organized lectures. In 2018, his essay Desintegriert Euch! (Disintegrate!) was published at Carl Hanser. His second essay, Gegenwartsbewältigung (Coping with the Present), was published in August 2020.