Focusing on Irena’s Gift, a 2025 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Autobiography & Memoir that judges described as “reads like a thriller,” this event explores how hidden histories can rupture families—and ultimately reshape our understanding of who we are. Karen Kirsten grew up in a Christian home, unaware that her Jewish mother had been smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a backpack, or that the people who raised her mother were not her parents, but an aunt and uncle concealing the truth. Only after a letter from a stranger arrived when her mother was 32, did the family’s Holocaust secrets begin to surface. We’ll discuss how reckoning with moral complexity, family betrayal, and silenced history can reframe our identities—and why excavating these truths matters so deeply at a time when Jewish identity itself is under scrutiny.

Karen Kirsten is the author of Irena's Gift, a 2025 National Jewish Book Award finalist, winner of Zibby Awards for Best Family Drama & Best Story of Overcoming, an Australian Jewish Book Award finalist, and described by Pulitzer prize winning author Geraldine Brooks as, “a disturbing investigation into the power of secrets to harm and to haunt.”

Karen is an Australian-American writer and Holocaust educator who speaks on the topics of hatred and reconciliation around the world. Her essay, “Searching for the Nazi Who Saved My Mother’s Life” was selected by Narratively as one of their Best Ever stories and nominated for The Best American Essays. Karen’s writing has also appeared in Salon, Huffington Post, The Week, The Jerusalem Post, WIEZ in Poland, Boston's National Public Radio station, The Boston Herald, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and more.