Alexandra Zapruder
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, a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages and related educational materials designed for middle and high school teachers.
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 and currently serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation in Washington, D.C. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, 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 Magazine, and The New York Times.
Twitter: @AZapruder
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
I’ve gotten a lot of very odd conspiracy-oriented questions from readers of my book about the Zapruder Film. But the oddest (and one of my favorites) was asked by a high school student when I was speaking about my book Salvaged Pages to a huge auditorium full of vaguely menacing teens in Phoenix, AZ. He asked me, “Do you speak Jew?” I wasn’t sure (still am not) whether he was trying to provoke me or whether it was a real question. But it has served as a useful touchstone for me in the past years, reminding me that for a lot of people in America, Jewishness is and remains alien and foreign. It’s not something that is wise to forget.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I’ve become much more committed to reading books that I don’t like than I used to. In particular, even if a book makes me uncomfortable, I usually push through it if I feel that I’m being pushed in a constructive and challenging way. But if I have a visceral reaction of anger or resentment – usually if a book is inscrutable, poorly written, or cheap in some fundamental way -- then I abandon it after the first chapter.
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
I particularly love the work of the early Italian Renaissance painter Giotto. I studied art history in college and I consider myself reasonably well-educated about art, and I love a great many artists. But Giotto is special to me. He experimented with the use of color and light to create volume in a way that was revolutionary in the context of medieval art and that ushered in the Renaissance. His paintings of faces are full of emotion and nuance and his animals are deeply real and tender. Check out his donkeys and sheep sometime! Amazing. I’ve visited the Arena Chapel in Padua several times where he painted his most famous cycle of works and have seen some of his other work in situ in Florence and Assisi.
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
I collect vintage Lusterware, which is a type of porcelain with a metallic glaze that looks slightly iridescent. It was very popular in the 30s and 40s and I particularly love the Japanese variety but I have pieces from Belgium, England, and elsewhere. I have a lot of classic pieces like vases and plates but now I mostly look for pieces that are whimsical and unusual – an elephant sugar and cream set, a mushroom salt and pepper shaker, a tiered candy box. They are hand-painted and the designs are often gorgeous and they are great to collect because they are very cheap.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I love to make art though I do not consider myself to be at all accomplished. I have recently gotten a bit more serious about art – I took a drawing class and started studying watercolor to understand basic technique rather than just winging it (which usually yields disappointing results.) I’m not talented in visual art but I very much like being a beginner even though it’s very uncomfortable. I think it’s incredibly important and good for my brain to see in different ways, to escape my very analytical mind, and push myself to create artistically even if what I make isn’t particularly amazing or even good. I also love to cook though only when I’m so moved. Regular dinner is drudgery for me. I find that it’s mentally restful to do something with my hands other than typing.
