'Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings' at New College of Florida

December 1, 2011 — New College Library Association (NCLA) and (AJC) American Jewish Committee proudly present Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings, an exhibition from the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit will open February 8, 2012, and close on March 30, 2012, at the Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the New College of Florida campus (5800 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, FL 34243).

For Americans, the iconography of Nazism is found in the swastika, the jackboot and the Nazi banner. But another symbol – flames and fire – accompanied the Third Reich from its strident inception to its apocalyptic demise. The exhibit focuses on how a series of book burnings, initiated by German university students on May 10, 1933, became a powerful symbol during World War II, prompting counter demonstrations in New York and other American cities. Many American writers’ books were burned as well, including Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller and Jack London. Ironically, among those books targeted for destruction were the works of Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1822 penned the prophetic words, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”
For more information, please contact Johnette Cappadona, Executive Director, New College Library Association at [email protected] or 941-487-4600.
The New College Library Association was founded in 1964 to provide direct financial support to ensure the Jane Bancroft Cook Library has the intellectual resources to serve Florida’s official Honors College and Sarasota’s finest institutions of higher learning. The Library boasts a rich collection of 280,000 volumes, thanks to the NCLA, which has provided more than $2 million for the purchase of books and other materials. The Library’s permanent Helen Fagin Collection features materials related to the Holocaust, genocide and humanitarian studies.