Sapiro v. Ford tells the riveting true story of Aaron Sapiro, a young Jewish lawyer who took on one of America’s most powerful men—and most notorious antisemites—Henry Ford. In the 1920s, as Ford’s anti-Jewish publications incited hatred across the nation, Sapiro filed an unprecedented libel suit, challenging the limits of hate speech long before such laws existed.
From his humble beginnings as an orphan in San Francisco to leading a nationwide movement empowering farmers, Sapiro’s life was a testament to courage, vision, and justice. Portrayed by actor Ben Shenkman, Sapiro’s words are presented in their entirety, filmed as if speaking directly to a modern audience. At the same time, historical experts illuminate the stakes of his confrontation with Ford.
In a David-versus-Goliath showdown, Sapiro forced the industrial titan to back down, issue an apology, and shutter his hate-filled newspaper, leaving a legacy that resonates today. As antisemitism rises and the struggle to balance free speech with protection against hate continues, Sapiro v. Ford examines the enduring question: how can societies confront power, prejudice, and propaganda while upholding justice?
Following the screening, there will be a talkback featuring director Gaylen Ross and producer Carol King.
Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center
The Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center is the physical presence of JewishGen, the genealogical research division of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Our professional genealogists, who are experts in family history research, are here to guide and assist you, whether you are just starting your search or digging deeper into your family tree. With unlimited access to JewishGen’s powerful online tools and many other essential resources, the Kalikow Center is your personalized launchpad for discovery.
Here, your family’s past comes to life. Genealogical research—especially Jewish family history—can be a fascinating but complex journey, filled with hidden details, unfamiliar languages, and elusive records. That’s where we come in.
Come with questions. Leave with stories. Your history is waiting—let the Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center help you discover it.
The center is open on:
Wednesdays at 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursdays at 12:00 – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Sundays 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
We encourage you to make a reservation. Walk-ins are also welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.
Museum admission is required to visit the center.
Free for Museum members.
Free Admission Thursday, 4–8 PM. Contact: 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org.
One ticket per appointment. For additional guests, please book another spot here or visit the Museum Admissions Desk.
Please feel free to complete this optional form to help us better prepare for your visit.
Museum Members
Visitors have access to all exhibitions at the Museum at any time during opening hours. Click here to see all exhibitions on view.
To reserve free admission, please select your ticket type below and Add to Cart. You may visit at any time between 4-8PM on the day of your reservation.
COVID-19 Safety Guidelines: Please review our Health and Safety page before planning your visit for more information on COVID safety requirements and our visitation guidelines.
Sign in at the top right corner of this page. If you do not already have an online account with us, please create an account using your member email. Your Member discounts will be reflected in your cart at checkout.
Not a member? Join today or email membership@mjhnyc.org for assistance.
We provide free admission to Holocaust Survivors, active members of the military, first responders, and NYC DOE K-12 students. If this applies to you, please contact us at 646-437-4202 to schedule your visit.
We also accept the Sightseeing Pass and the Go City Pass, please bring your pass to the Museum for free admission.
Groups of 15 or more must book through the Group Tours page.
Bessarabia has a unique history within the Pale of Settlement, shaped by its time under the Ottoman and Russian Empires and a Jewish presence dating back to the 15th–16th centuries. Most genealogical records, such as vital records, revision lists, and burial records, begin in the 19th century, with additional 20th-century materials including deportation records and memorial sources. Many of these have been translated and made available through JewishGen, along with Yizkor books and personal memoirs. In this webinar, Yefim Kogan will share how to research Jewish history and genealogy in Bessarabia.
About the Speaker:
Yefim Abram Kogan is the Leader and Coordinator of the JewishGen Bessarabia Division. Born in Kishinev, Moldova, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1989 and has since conducted extensive genealogical and historical research. He holds a Master of Jewish Liberal Studies from Hebrew College in Boston, focusing on Eastern European Jewish history. In 2011, he founded the JewishGen Bessarabia SIG and developed its website, along with several KehilaLinks sites. His major projects include the Bessarabia Revision List, with over 300,000 records, and the Bessarabia Cemetery Project, documenting more than 90 cemeteries and 75,000 burial records. He is a frequent speaker at Jewish genealogical societies and IAJGS conferences and, in 2025, published Jewish Families in Shtetl Kaushany, Bessarabia with JewishGen Press.
Join the Museum for a screening of Who Will Write Our History in coordination with our new exhibition
In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper.
Now, for the first time, their story is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the Oyneg Shabes archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. They defied their murderous enemy with the ultimate weapon – the truth – and risked everything so that their archive would survive the war, even if they did not.
Run Time: 90 minutes
Following the Civil War, prominent fire insurance companies in the United States issued instructions to their agents to deny Jews fire insurance policies because of their alleged proclivity to arson. In the years that followed, the stereotype of the Jewish arsonist spread throughout the United States, appearing in fire insurance manuals, cartoons, songs, and silent films.
Jewish Firebugs presents the first detailed exploration of both the accusations and the realities of Jewish arson from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. Drawing on such diverse records as fire department reports, insurance records, newspapers, trial transcripts, and humor journals, Jeffrey Marx delves into the social forces that created and then sensationalized the caricature of the Jewish arsonist, investigating how and why Jews became the only racial/ethnic group to be targeted this way in the United States. The book critically assesses how these antisemitic representations were solidified in the American imagination–from the spread of jokes and cartoons, to vaudeville performances across the country.
In addition, Marx also investigates the various factors that led to arson criminal activity in Jewish neighborhoods, the unique way that Jewish “arson gangs” were organized, and how the fire insurance companies actively supported their efforts. Jewish Firebugs illustrates the socioeconomic realities of Jewish immigrant life at the turn of the nineteenth century, and details what the Jewish arsonist trope reveals about the dynamics of antisemitism in the United States.
Research Assistance at the Peter and Mary Kalikow Jewish Genealogy Research Center
Meet one‑on‑one with a professional genealogist during a 45‑minute in‑person session. They will help you explore your family history, answer questions, and guide your research.
The center is open on:
Wednesdays: 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Thursdays: 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm & 4:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Sundays: 10:00 am – 12:30 pm & 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
We encourage you to make a reservation. Walk-ins are also welcome on a first-come, first-served basis.
Pricing:
First‑time visit: $18 includes Museum Admission
Free for Members
Returning visit –: $72 includes Museum Admission
$54 for Members
Three-Visit Package $195
$150 for Members.
One ticket per appointment. For additional guests, please book another spot here or visit the Museum Admissions Desk.
Free admission for first‑time visitors on Thursdays from 4–8 PM. Contact 646.437.4202 or kalikow@jewishgen.org
Please feel free to complete this optional form to help us better prepare for your visit.
Boy on the Run tells the gripping story of Paul Galan, who recounts the unbelievable story of his survival in the Holocaust as a child. He shares how, at the age of six, he was compelled to wear a distinctive gold star on his clothing, as per the oppressive Nuremberg Laws, when the Nazi regime took control. Amidst numerous close calls with death, he and his family eventually found themselves in a labor camp in Slovakia, where they were liberated during an uprising. Soon after, they embarked on a perilous journey across the Sudetes mountains, disguised as Lutherans with falsified documents, desperately seeking refuge from kind-hearted strangers. Boy on the Run vividly recounts this extraordinary journey, including a tense night when he and his family found themselves sharing quarters with a Nazi soldier.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers of Boy on the Run, Brianne Berkson and Miguel Gluckstern.
This fascinating new biography recounts the life and legacy of a titan of American banking, Louis Graveraet Kaufman (1870–1942). Also known as LG, he was a Gatsbyesque figure born in Michigan's Upper Peninsula who married into great wealth and then amassed far more of his own. Under LG, New York's Chatham Phenix National Bank and Trust Company became one of the nation's largest banks and the first in New York to boast a network of branches. When he was denied entry into the exclusive, Protestant, old-money Huron Mountain Club, LG responded by building his own retreat: the world's largest log lodge, a 26,000-square-foot behemoth near Marquette, Michigan. Christened Granot Loma, it became the site of lavish Prohibition-era parties, attracting many celebrities who came in private rail cars to enjoy jazz and liquor chez Kaufman. A darling of the press, LG became a household name, making news by coordinating the famous takeover of General Motors in 1916, narrowly escaping death in the Wall Street Bombing of 1920, and financing the Empire State Building during the Great Depression. Author Ann Berman highlights Kaufman's remarkable journey from "barefoot boy" to trailblazing branch banking giant, proving LG was not just a man of his time but one worth reading about over a century later.
Berman will be in discussion about the book with Jason M. Barr, professor of economics at Rutgers University-Newark.
Join the Grünbaum Fischer Foundation (GFF) and the Museum for GFF’s Fifth Annual Gala and Awards Ceremony, featuring the World Premier of Dead City III, an original jazz composition by Domo Branch, as well as musical and other performances by 2026 GFF Scholars. The Gala and Awards ceremony honor the life and legacy of “Fritz” Grünbaum, a legendary cabaret artist who dominated the stages of Berlin and Vienna, also bringing his virtuosity to radio and numerous films that he wrote, directed, and acted in. When Hitler arrived in Vienna in March 1938, Fritz was at the top of the Nazis’ target list of cultural enemies and was immediately deported to the Dachau Concentration Camp. There, he continued to give performances until two weeks before his death in January 1941. Funding for the GFF comes from restitution and sales of Fritz’s art collection, which included Egon Schiele’s Dead City III, the inspiration for Branch’s jazz composition. GFF is honored to celebrate this important occasion at the Museum, which will also serve to remember and honor the work of MJH Co-Founder Robert M. Morgenthau, whose own work in support of Holocaust era restitution, including Dead City III, was monumental.
In Jewish Women at Home in the World, Melissa R. Klapper documents the remarkable number of American Jewish women who traveled abroad in the mid-19th to mid-20th century. These women went to school overseas, visited relatives and hometowns, worked abroad, attended international activist meetings, and took sightseeing trips alone, with family members or friends, or with organized tour groups. The volume looks specifically at the role that gender and Jewish identity, as well as their American background, played in the women’s choices of where to go, what to do, whom to see, and how to behave.
This highly readable book charts how spending time abroad enhanced American Jewish women' s status and often challenged conventional gender roles by expanding their autonomy. Moreover, it explores how going abroad reinforced their Jewish identity, particularly in the face of unsettling encounters with antisemitism. Drawing on a treasure trove of previously unexamined diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, periodicals, scrapbooks, and photographs, Jewish Woman at Home in the World provides an engaging analysis of travel as a crucial mechanism for solidifying a diasporic identity, allowing American Jewish women to create and maintain connections with Jews worldwide.
Klapper will be in discussion about the book with Kirsten Fermaglich, Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.
When a family in Memphis, Tennessee, discovers a box of century-old letters in their attic, a journey begins: not only to learn about the young man who wrote the letters from the holy city of Hebron in British Mandate Palestine, but about the massacre that took his life in 1929. Yardena Schwartz draws from these letters, along with extensive research and wide-ranging interviews of Israelis and Palestinians now living in Hebron, to tell a timely, captivating narrative. This meticulously researched examination of the Israel-Palestine conflict's origins interweaves historical analysis with contemporary insights, providing crucial context for understanding today's Middle East tensions.
Schwartz will discuss Ghosts of A Holy War with author and journalist Abigail Pogrebin.
It all started with the discovery of a manuscript, hidden away in a box in a house in Norfolk, England, unread for more than thirty years—a discovery that propelled journalist Sharon Ring to learn more about her relatives, including two young German children named Heini and Edie, and their past. Heini and Edie, aged 9 and 5, grew up in Berlin during the Third Reich. Though they were raised as Christians, under the Nuremberg Laws, the siblings were classified as “Mischlinge,” hybrid, mixed blood, mongrels, because they had two Jewish grandparents. As Mischlinge, they were subject to the same degradations and cruelties as other Jews and were eventually condemned to death. There were thousands of “Mischlinge” like Heini and Edie across Germany and Europe, yet their tragic experiences within the historical record of the Holocaust have largely remained untold.
Ring will discuss with author Andrew Nagorski.
Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.
With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the Ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and the partisans in the forest.
Her book, On Both Sides of the Wall, first published in Yiddish in 1948, was based on a series of 27 articles Vladka wrote in the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in 1946–47. In 2026, Vladka's son, Dr. Steven D. Meed, released a revised translation of the book.
Dr. Meed will discuss his mother's life and writings with his wife Dr. Rita Meed and Dr. Avinoam Patt, the Maurice and Corinne Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University.