All Attendees Welcome
How to Keep the Memory of the Holocaust Alive in the Digital Age
Featuring Melissa Mott, Tyler Goldberger, Montana Tucker, Alexandra Zapruder
Speakers
Tyler Goldberger
Public Historian
Tyler J. Goldberger is an advanced History PhD candidate at William & Mary specializing in historical memory. His research interests surround sites of memory, transnationalism, and human rights in the United States and Spain in the 20th and 21st centuries. He speaks annually for The International School of Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel and supported the creation of the Echoes and Reflections video toolbox “Liberators and Survivors: The First Moments,” which, at 5.1 million views, is Yad Vashem’s most viewed video. Tyler’s research and pedagogy have been generously supported by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, New York Public Library, Duke University Human Rights Archive, and Charles E. Scheidt Teaching & Research Grant for Atrocity Prevention, among others.
Montana Tucker
Social Media Activist
With almost 14 million combined followers across her social media platforms, the majority being GenZ, award winning actress, singer, dancer, philanthropist, and social media activist, Montana Tucker, empowers from every angle. As a singer, she has had her songs featured in blockbuster movies, and as an actress, she has been in award winning TV shows and movies, but Montana’s passion has always been to combat antisemitism, as well as all forms of hate and to educate people to love others for their kind hearts and souls and not because of their color, race, sexual preference or religion.
Montana garnered acclaim for her educational online docuseries, “How To: Never Forget”, where she traveled to Poland. The emotional journey culminated with a 10-part docuseries that Tucker posted on her social media channels last fall. The series ends with a visit to Auschwitz, where all 4 of Montana’s great grandparents were murdered and her grandmother Lilly survived. The series was nominated for a Webby Award.
She has been honored by numerous organizations including Magen David Adom, Hatzalah, The National Holocaust Museum, Artists 4 Israel, Auschwitz Jewish Foundation and International Influencer Awards. She most recently headlined the March for Israel Rally in Washington, DC and was the guest speaker for the National Menorah Lighting in Washington this past Hanukkah. In December, Montana met with President Herzog in Israel as well as released hostages and survivors of the Nova Music Festival and kibbutzim.
Montana continues to be one of the strongest voices and leaders reaching the Gen Z population to combat antisemitism.
Alexandra Zapruder
Editor of Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust and Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation
Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served on the curatorial team for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Ed.M. in Education at Harvard University in 1995.
In 2002, Alexandra completed her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. It has since been published in Dutch and Italian. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005 and was nominated for two Emmy awards. In the fall of 2015, she completed a second paperback edition and a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages and, in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves, published related educational materials designed for middle and high school teachers. She contributed an essay about young writers’ diaries to the Anne Frank House Permanent Catalogue, which was published in eight languages.
In November 2016, she published her second book, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. She curated a permanent exhibition titled And Still I Write: Young Diarists on War and Genocide which opened at Holocaust Museum Houston in 2019. In 2020, in partnership with EIHR, she launched a project called Dispatches from Quarantine which provided a platform for young people to document their real-time experiences of life during the Covid-19 Pandemic and published an online gallery showcasing their contributions in prose, poetry, photography, art, and song. In 2021-22, she ghostwrote a forthcoming memoir about a German-Jewish refugee family during the Holocaust and consulted on an online-exhibition at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research on the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski from the Vilna Ghetto.
Alexandra serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights (EIHR), a nonprofit that develops partnerships with teachers in post-conflict countries to provide training in best practices on human rights, genocide prevention, and Holocaust education.
She has been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.
Moderator
Melissa Mott
Director of Antisemitism, Holocaust and Genocide Education, ADL
Melissa is the Director of Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide Education at ADL. A former 10th-grade English teacher in Newark Public Schools and a Fulbright scholar in Poland, Melissa studies the intersection of history education, collective memory, and anti-democratic thought.
Melissa has written curriculum and programs, and trained educators on Holocaust pedagogy, antisemitism education, inquiry-learning, human rights, and LGBTQIA+ history, in the U.S., Kenya, Ghana, Israel, Poland, UK, and Germany. Melissa received her Ed.M. from Columbia University Teachers College in 2017, focusing on the link between antisemitism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment in former Soviet countries. Melissa helms ADL’s programs on the Holocaust, genocide, and antisemitism education.