Creating a Life in Difficult Circumstances

The Jung Center of Houston and Holocaust Museum Houston present a panel discussion – Creating a Life in Difficult Circumstances.

How do you begin again when the life you have known is destroyed? What does resilience mean for survivors of profound trauma, dislocation, and the violent death of loved ones?

For immigrants fleeing political oppression and genocide, the commitment to begin a new life in America involves radical choices about who they intend to become and how to carry and honor memory.

In this panel moderated by Claudia Kolker, recent immigrants and survivors of the Holocaust will reflect on the material, psychological, and spiritual choices they made as they created new lives.

Moderator Claudia Kolker (pictured) is an award-winning reporter and the author of The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope. Her book was one of O Magazine's "Ten Titles to Pick Up Now," has been profiled in the New York Times and "PBS Newshour," and was an Amazon's number one best-seller on immigration in 2013.

Kolker worked as a freelancer in El Salvador from 1992-1995, where she covered the Salvadoran postwar recovery and social issues throughout Central America, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. She later spent four months in India and Pakistan writing on democracy and diversity. In her adopted hometown of Houston, she has worked as Los Angeles Times' Houston bureau chief, is a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board, and is deputy director of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Community Health Leaders.

She graduated from Harvard and has studied at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and El Colegio de Mexico. Her work has been published in O: The Oprah Magazine, The Economist, The Sunday Telegraph of London, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and Salon. She is currently a contributing editor for the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle, where she first created the immigrant affairs beat in 1997.