NEW YORK, New York– Dr. Samuel D. Kassow, who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars on the Holocaust and the Jews of Poland, will be honored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, it was announced recently by the Institute. 

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman will also be honored at the YIVO’s 2019 Gala Award Dinner, which will be held on Wednesday, Nov.  20 at 6:30 p.m.  Film producer Nancy Spielberg, president of Playmount Productions, will serve as the evening’s Master of Ceremonies.

Kassow is the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and has won numerous awards, and has lectured widely. 

Kassow’s 2007 book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, which tells the story of the secret buried archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, was made into a documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Roberta Grossman, who wrote, produced and directed “Who Will Write Our History.” Spielberg served as executive producer on the film, which is being screened globally and is slated for national broadcast in early 2020.

Grossman and Spielberg also worked together on the 2014 film Above and Beyond, about the American–Jewish WWII pilots who volunteered to fight for Israel in the 1948 War, with Grossman serving as director and Spielberg as producer.