Among Neighbors
Dates : December 14, 2025 — March 30, 2026
SCREENING: MONDAY, MARCH 30 WITH FILMMAKER IN PERSON. Using hand-drawn animation to bring the past to life “Among Neighbors” focuses on one of the last living Holocaust survivors from a small Polish town, and on an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there – six months after the Nazis were defeated.
No performaces are currently available.
Among Neighbors
Co-Presented by the USC Shoah Foundation
Combining evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, “Among Neighbors” examines Jewish Polish relations through the story of Gniewoszów, a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries. At its core, the film zeroes in on the last living Holocaust survivor from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there – not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors.
Today, all signs of Jewish life in the small town of Gniewoszów have vanished – even the Jewish tombstones disappeared, having been stolen from the destroyed cemetery. Now, a lifetime after the Holocaust, award-winning American filmmaker Yoav Potash (“Crime After Crime”, Sundance Film Festival) unearths the deepest mysteries of this town, revealing both the love and the hatred that local poles felt for their Jewish neighbors. The town’s oldest residents, the in the twilight of their days, divulge secrets held their entire lives, and their stories came to life in stunning animated scenes, accented by artful touches of magical realism.
Conversation with Director Yoav Potash, USC Shoah Foundation CEO and Foundation Chair Finci Viterbi, Robert J. Williams , and Dr. Joanna Sliwa following the screening.
Yoav Potash is an award-winning writer, director, and producer. He produced and directed the Sundance premiere documentary “Crime After Crime,” a New York Times Critics’ Pick and winner of 25 honors, including a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the National Board of Review Freedom of Expression Award, and six audience awards. The documentary had a national primetime broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network, streamed on Netflix, and is now available on Amazon Prime. The film helped spark movements to change domestic violence law in multiple US states. Yoav also directed the San Francisco IndieFest Jury Prize-winning documentary “Food Stamped,” which was nationally broadcast on Pivot, Participant Media’s cable/satellite network. Yoav is an alumnus of UC Berkeley, where he received the university’s top prize in creative writing.
Dr. Joanna Sliwa is a historian of the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history and serves as Historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies and the University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). The Claims Conference is the only non-governmental organization that negotiates with the German government on behalf of Jewish Holocaust survivors to secure compensation.
Her work centers on research, education, and program management. Dr. Sliwa has previously held positions at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught courses at Kean University and Rutgers University–New Brunswick and served as a faculty adviser with the Master Teacher Institute in Holocaust Education at Rutgers. In addition to her academic roles, she has worked as a researcher, translator, and consultant on scholarly and public history projects and regularly lectures to diverse audiences on Holocaust and Jewish history.
Dr. Robert J. Williams is CEO and Finci-Viterbi Chair of the USC Shoah Foundation, UNESCO Chair on Antisemitism and Holocaust Research, and Academic Advisor to the 35-nation International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
For close to a decade, Dr. Williams was a member of the delegation of the United States of America to the IHRA, where he oversaw efforts focused on the opening of archives and served as longtime chair of the Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial. He served on the Federal Republic of Germany’s Global Task Force on Holocaust Distortion, was a senior advisor to the Swedish government for the planning of the 2021 Malmö Heads of State Forum, and designed and launched the US-German Ministerial Bilateral Dialogue on Holocaust Issues for the US and German governments. At this time, he also served as deputy director for international affairs at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Previously, he had been the museum’s director of new research in the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.
His recent book is the coedited Routledge History of Antisemitism (2023). He is currently writing a monograph on efforts to whitewash and rehabilitate the reputations of fascists and Holocaust perpetrators in North America and Europe, a separate book on US and Soviet media policy in occupied Germany, and he has begun research on the politics of Holocaust and genocide commemoration in former Yugoslav countries.
- Dir. Yoav Potash| 2025 | United States, Poland | 100 min
- Documentary
- English and Polish w/ English subtitles