Kingsborough Holocaust Center

Lea Fridman is a senior member of the Kingsborough Department of English with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a strong arts and interdisciplinary background. As a graduate student in the ’70’s, she participated in pioneering conferences in Holocaust studies and literature. This was a watershed moment in Holocaust studies which led to spin-off disciplines in trauma studies, genocide studies and more.

Her own work of literary criticism, Words and Witness:  Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representations of the Holocaust (SUNY 2000), is a study of the techniques employed by writers in their effort to find the words adequate to experiences that are utterly beyond words.  

On a personal level she has been deeply shaped by the experiences of her parents: her father who survived Buchenwald and other camps; her mother, who spent the war years as a Bielski partisan in the Polish woods.  Both were the only survivors of large families. Those losses were formative to Fridman’s moral and intellectual development: to her understanding of race in America, to the prevalence of group think, its role in politics and of so much more. 

Fridman’s magical realist play, W/Hole in the Heart,used the setting of a Passover seder to tell a few of those family stories. Directed by Robert Kalfin the play was produced at the Cardozo School of Law and in other venues in New York and Tel Aviv. One outgrowth of her work culminated in the 2009 conference which she led and organized, “From the Slave System of the American South to the Forced Labor System of Leopold’s Congo," sponsored by the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies. More recently she has published in the fields of theater criticism and music.

Alissa Levine is the Director of Workforce Development Programs in the Division of Continuing Education, Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships. Ms. Levine started working at Kingsborough in 2007 and has designed and implemented training programs that respond to labor market and employer demand. Ms. Levine manages community partnerships, oversees the Social Work and Mental Health Counseling CE program and co-chairs the Faculty and Staff Wellness committee. She holds a BA in Psychology from SUNY Stony Brook and an MSW from New York University. Ms. Levine is a New York State licensed clinical social worker (LCSW).  

Ms. Levine is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and has been actively involved in, and supportive of efforts to carry on the stories and lessons of the Holocaust. 

Luz Evelia Martin del Campo is a first-generation college graduate and was born in Guadalajara, México, and is a scholar in Ecological Anthropology and Gender Studies. Her gender analysis framework examines the anthropogenic influences impacting rainforest conservation, sustainable development, land use, vernacular environmental cartography, and landscape change in the Lacandón Rainforest in México. She earned her B.A. degree in Political Science, and M.A. degree in Applied Urban Anthropology at The City College of New York, and as part of her graduate coursework, she studied with Professor William Helmreich, and traveled to Poland to examine the “Sociology of the Holocaust,” in Cracow, Warsaw, Lublin, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Majdanek. She earned her Ph.D. as an Alumni-Land Use Environmental Change Institute Fellow at the University of Florida in Gainesville. 

Luz's earlier portfolio also involved being the Hillel President at CCNY-CUNY, working with the Jewish community of Morrocco while working with the Joint Distribution Committee in Casablanca, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC), and being Director of the Office of Academic Affairs for the Rothberg International School (RIS-HU) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was also interviewed for the Brooklyn Jewish History Project, Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History 

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/digitalcollections/item/1ad5c0d6-d032-48ca-8516-087c3e58ec25 

Robert Schacter has been working in Academic Affairs at Kingsborough since August 2013. He currently works on the Student Success team providing administrative support to Dean Yelena Bondar. He also serves as an advisor for Kingsborough’s local Phi Theta Kappa chapter and works closely with the Grade and Tuition Appeal committee, and also helps plan a number of campus-based events including the Awards Ceremony and the Faculty Achievements Recognition Ceremony. In his spare time, Robert enjoys spending time outdoors with his family or playing soccer with his 10-year-old son, and also loves to read, watch movies, visit museums and play music.

Alex Teplish was born in Odessa, Ukraine, formerly known as the USSR. Having his grandparents survive concentration camps during the Holocaust and his parents struggling to live a decent life, they decided to immigrate to the United States, while Alex was still young. He went on to enjoy an average, American childhood and life growing up in Brooklyn, NY. Upon graduating from Stony Brook University, Alex Teplish worked diligently for over 20 years to become a leading expert in digital and interactive technologies. Outside of his corporate career, Alex has tapped into his creative side to author and self-publish two graphic novels. The first, a science-fiction book based on the Ancient Astronaut Theories is titled In The Beginning: The Epic of the Anunnaki. His second book, Survivor: Aron's Story, part illustrated memoir and part history book, depicts his grandfather's survival during WWII and one of the least documented episodes of the Holocaust. Alex has recently adapted the content of this book into an Interactive Virtual Museum, available to the public and ideal for Holocaust education.