Bret Werb is Music Collection Curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, a position he has held since the museum first opened in 1993.  In addition to programming the museum's long-running chamber music series, Werb produced four CD recordings of Shoah song repertoire for the museum: Krakow Ghetto Notebook; Rise Up And Fight!: Songs of Jewish Partisans; Hidden History: Songs of the Kovno Ghetto; and Ballads and Broadsides, the last featuring archival recordings of Polish prisoners' songs from the Nazi camps.  Werb has contributed to several music and Holocaust reference works, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians and the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies.  He currently curates the online exhibition "Music of the Holocaust" (www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/music).  Werb earned his MA in ethnomusicology at UCLA, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the same institution.

Bret Werb's presentation

Title: "We Will Never Die (1943): A Pageant to Save the Jews of Europe"

Describes the genesis and fate of We Will Never Die, a large-scale touring propaganda “pageant” created in 1943 by Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, Broadway composer Kurt Weill and Zionist activist Peter Bergson.  The goal of this theatrical enterprise was to bring word to the largely uninformed American public of the Nazi genocide of Jews then taking place in Europe (a story that was not well-reported in the mainstream news media of the day), and to secure funding for an independent Jewish army to take up arms against the Germans.  The presentation draws on archival photographs, newsreel footage and a rare broadcast recording of the pageant's celebrity-filled final performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.