Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations created Yizkor books (or yizker bikher) beginning in the 1940s to commemorate Jewish communities destroyed during the war. Focusing on Polish Jewry, a community that faced nearly total annihilation,  Adler’s work highlights the grassroots activism of survivors and the reconstruction of Polish Jewish history and traditions that the Nazis sought to destroy.

Adler is a professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghamton University and the 2024/2025 Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her most recent book, "Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union" (Harvard University Press), came out in 2020 and won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research as well as the Rachel Feldhay Brenner Award in Polish Jewish Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Carson Lecture Series.