The Power of Art Panelists
Dr. Barbara Wallace Grossman is a theatre historian, theatre director, voice specialist, and author. Her strong interests as a researcher and practitioner focus on Holocaust-related theatre and film, contemporary musical theatre, arts advocacy, and mindfulness practice to alleviate anxiety, develop resilience, and promote positive change. Professor of Theatre at Tufts University, she also is a certified mindfulness instructor affiliated with the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults. Her publications include Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (Indiana University Press), A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage (Southern Illinois University Press), and several book chapters focusing on the Holocaust and musical theatre.
A Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts (1994-1999) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (2000-2005), she was Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Cultural Council from 2007-2019. She currently serves on the American Repertory Theater’s Board of Advisors, the Anti-Defamation League’s New England Regional Board, the Jewish Arts Collaborative’s Arts Advisory Council, and the Board of Directors for MassCreative, the principal advocacy organization for the cultural sector in Massachusetts. In 2018 she was honored to receive the Terezín Music Foundation’s Legacy Award for her “commitment to diversity, tolerance, and dialogue through acts of civil service, philanthropy, scholarship, or artistry.” A member of Temple Emanuel in Newton, she sings with Kol Emanuel, the synagogue’s adult choir.
Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Slate, Salon, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and elsewhere.
She is the recipient of an HBI Research Award for The Weight of Ink, winner of a 2017 National Jewish Book Award, has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston.
Ellen Germain assumed her duties as Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues on August 23, 2021. She is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. Ms. Germain served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2018-2021. Her previous positions include director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (2015-2017), head of the U.S. Consulate General in Krakow, Poland (2012-2015), and postings as deputy political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad (2007-2008) and at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York (2008-2012) where she was responsible for issues relating to the Middle East, East Asia, and nonproliferation.
In Washington, D.C., Ms. Germain has also held positions in the offices of Russian Affairs, Israel-Palestinian Affairs, and Maghreb Affairs. Her other overseas tours were Tel Aviv, London, and Moscow. She joined the Foreign Service in 1995.
Ms. Germain was born and raised in New York City. She graduated from Hunter College High School and holds a B.A. in English from Stanford University, an M.A. in English from Columbia University, and an MPhil in computer speech and language processing from Cambridge University. Before joining the Foreign Service, Ms. Germain worked as a computer programmer and then as a science journalist. She speaks Bosnian and Polish, has studied Russian, and thinks she still remembers some French and Hebrew.
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe is the Director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University where she teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She is also director of the Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law that explores the tension between women’s equality claims and religious laws. Her research focuses on gender and multiculturalism in family law and on the intersection between secular and religious law. She is the author of Gender, Religion and Family Law: Theorizing Conflicts Between Women’s Rights and Cultural Traditions, (2012); The Polygamy Question, (2015); Women’s Rights and Religious Law, (2016) and was guest editor of a special issue of Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues on New Historical and Legal Perspectives on Jewish Divorce, (Volume 31, 2017). She is a co-founder of the Boston Agunah Task Force, devoted to research, education and advocacy for women under Jewish family law. She holds three law degrees; an LLB from Osgoode Hall Law School and LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School. Before coming to HBI, she taught in the Faculty of Laws, University College London and was law clerk to Justice Frank Iacobucci of the Supreme Court of Canada. She was called to the bar of the Law Society of Upper Canada.