Meet Bryan Davis & Lisa Adeli

 

Bryan L. Davis is Director of Jewish Community Relations and  Council Director of Holocaust Education Resource Center for the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona.  He teaches "Jewish Responses to the Holocaust" for The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies. This course examines the impact of the Holocaust on contemporary Jewish thought. Davis also teaches for the Honors College and the Language, Reading and Culture program. He is Currently working on his doctorate in Language, Reading and Culture in the College of Education.

Bryan Davis helped organize A Holocaust education teacher in-service, “Digital Literacies and Holocaust Education: Teaching the Holocaust with Video Testimonial,” held September 20, 2012 at the University of Arizona College of Education.

The program featured Sheila Hansen, the lead trainer of the USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness project. IWitness is an online application that gives educators and students access to more than 1,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses

“This is the first time we have partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation on a teacher workshop. We are excited about the potential for bringing in new teachers who might be drawn to the digital literacy emphasis of this program,” says Bryan Davis, director of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s Holocaust Education Resource Center.

The in-service is a program of the Holocaust Education and Commemoration Project, which is a joint effort of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and the Jewish History Museum.

 

Lisa Adeli has a Ph.D. in History from The University of Arizona. Her focus is Modern Balkan History, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. She is the author of Resistance to the Persecution of Ethnic Minorities in Croatia and Bosnia during World War II.  Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.

Dr. Adeli organizes presentations and workshops for teachers and community groups, including the March 2011 visit of Deborah DeSaix, author of the children's book The Grand Mosque in Paris: A Story of How Muslims Rescued Jews During the Holocaust.  She has developed lesson plans and curriculum units for teachers, presented at educational conferences and in January 2008  was the Tucson organizer/facilitator/speaker at a 3-city conference organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In the fall of 2012 Dr. Adeli arranged a student/teacher exchange focusing on the Holocaust and ethnic diversity with a Holocaust educator in Lodz, Poland. 10 Polish High School students with three of their teachers arrived in Arizona and were hosted by local Jewish families.  They visited the Jewish Museum at Stone Avenue Temple and attended Simchat Torah at Congregation Anshei Israel.

Currently Dr. Adeli is working with Lora  Vogt of the National World War I Museum to create a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for teachers on “World War I in the Balkans/Middle East.”