“A first-rate work of biography and history, addressing the film and the family in all their complexity and character...absorbing, deeply researched.”
“Enlightening...an intelligent blend of memoir and cultural criticism that breaks fresh ground in the crowded field of JFK assassination studies.”
“Written in fear and darkness by Jewish youth and adolescents, while waiting for death by SS executioners and their accomplices, these extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken hearts for many days and many nights.”
“Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes, particularly those aimed at youth or focusing on individuals. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”
Alexandra Zapruder is the author of two books: Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film (Twelve, 2016) and Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002.) She began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C where she served on the curatorial team for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story.
Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust 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. In 2020, she published an online gallery to showcase these teenagers’ contributions in prose, poetry, photography, art, and song. Other writing has appeared in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.
Zapruder was asked in an interview, why she chose to write 26 Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film: “I decided to write about the film because I realized in the aftermath of my father’s death that our family’s relationship to the film was a very significant one, and that this part of the film’s life had not been told, and that without it, the whole story of the film and its impact on American society and culture was incomplete. Once I realized that, I felt it was important – and meaningful for me as a writer and a person – to really look at the film’s history in all its dimensions and try to understand its meaning, legacy, and significance not only for us as a family but for American society as a whole.”
Alexandra serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation. She is ghost-writing a memoir about a German-Jewish refugee family during the Holocaust and co-curating an exhibition on the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski from the Vilna Ghetto. 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.
A graduate of Smith College, She earned her Ed.M. in Education at Harvard University in 1995.
Open and right-click to download
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
