Retired professor shares how art can spark social change

Retired professor Dr. Karen Berman on stage in the A&S Auditorium Wednesday evening. (Photo: Anna Gay Leavitt)

By Ian Wesselhoff

O n March 25, retired professor Dr. Karen Berman came back to Georgia College & State University to discuss her new work, "Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal," a two-volume set consisting of stories that demonstrate how the arts have been, and can be, used to combat hate.

Berman spent 12 years as chair and artistic director for the Department of Theatre & Dance, and she has directed over 150 productions in her career. She started working on these books after she retired, but her initial interest in the subject matter came from a place very close to her heart, long before.

"I became aware of discrimination very early in life," Berman said. "My mother told me stories of how she grew up as one of the Jewish families in the mountains of Toccoa, Georgia, and regularly had crosses burned on her lawn by the Ku Klux Klan."

First-year environmental sciences major Lily Harris said attending the event was eye-opening.

"I guess you don't realize that kind of stuff - prejudice and injustice - stuff like that can happen at such a young age," Harris said.

When Berman was Theatre & Dance chair, she collaborated with Dr. Wendy Mullen, then a music professor at Georgia College, to invite Holocaust survivor Ela Weissberger to campus to share her story. Mullen brought Weissberger and GCSU students together to put on a performance of "Brundibár," a children's opera about the Holocaust, at GCSU and later at a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Atlanta. On that night in Atlanta, Berman met 22 Holocaust survivors.

Years later, Mullen and Berman sought to write a book together about art as a means of resistance, resilience, hope and identity, and Berman brought in co-editor Dr. Gail Humphries, dean emerita at Stephens College. In the end, over 40 scholars and artists from all over the world contributed to the two volumes.

Berman joined the faculty at Georgia College in 2008 after teaching for 15 years at Georgetown University; she received the Georgia Governor's Award for the Arts in 2017.

"From the first moment I started here as Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance, I was so appreciative of the collegial, collaborative and interdisciplinary work environment I found here," Berman said.

She says an important impetus for her decision to write these books came during her time at GCSU.

Berman took students on four different study abroad trips to the Czech Republic, each time co-writing and directing a new play for the students to perform in Prague and the European Regions International Theatre Festival in Hradec Králové. The plays were focused on major Czech figures of the Holocaust, and students would perform as those real-world characters.

On these trips, Berman and the students would visit the Terezín concentration camp, and the students walked along the cobblestones where their characters once trod.

"In assessing what they learned, one student said, 'Even though language divides us, theatre transcends all,'" Berman said.

Dr. Berman gave a reading and signed copies of her books for audience members Wednesday evening. The event was sponsored by the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Photos by Anna Gay Leavitt