Download a printer-friendly version of the contest description and guidelines here

Introduction

Babe Ruth in many ways adopted St. Petersburg as his “home away from home.” He played Major League Spring Training Baseball in St. Petersburg for ten years (1925-35), first with the New York Yankees and one year with the Boston Braves. It is believed he hit his longest home run ever against Major League pitching in 1934 in St. Petersburg.

Babe Ruth is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player ever. Not as well known is his work as a humanitarian, including his love for his daughters Dorothy and Julia, commitment to children and youth, charitable work, philanthropy, friendship with African Americans and other minorities, and stand against hatred as evidenced by his signature in support of the 1942 “Christmas Declaration” condemning the mass murder of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Guidelines for Educators

The contest is open to high school students in public, religious, and private schools as well as home-schooled. The contest’s goal is to engage students in thinking about justice and injustice in their world. From bullying to abuse, young people today face difficult situations and decisions. The Student handout will contain the text below to provide guidelines for creating contest entries.

Tell us about the time you stood up to injustice.

• The purpose of the contest is to make Babe Ruth’s tremendous moral courage on behalf of both European Jews during the Holocaust and African American baseball players in the 1940s relevant and inspiring for today’s young people.
• Essays will be judged on perceptiveness, creativity, and facility with the English language.
• Please submit essay document in a PDF format with two spaces between lines. Use the standard Arial 12 pt. type font. The essays should be between 500 and 1,000 words.
• At the end of the essay, please type in your name, age, grade, name of teacher or advisor and her/his preferred phone number and email.
• Email PDF to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com and type “Babe Ruth Hero” in the subject line.
• Videos and Podcasts will judged on perceptiveness, creativity, and facility with the digital techniques. They must be at least two minutes and no longer than three minutes. Please display your name, age, grade, name of teacher or advisor and her/his preferred phone number as a screen credit at end of entry or as a spoken word audio credit for podcasts.
• For video submissions, email a YouTube web link to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com and type “Babe Ruth Hero / Video” in subject line. Submit podcast entries as an MP3 file attached to email. Write “Babe Ruth Hero / Podcast” in subject line.
• Deadline is midnight Thursday, March 15, 2018.

Teacher/Advisors will receive an email confirmation within seven days of submission. If you do not receive a confirmation, please re-email submission to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com and text 215.964-3937.

This contest is presented by Keep St. Pete Lit in conjunction with the St. Petersburg Museum of History for the SunLit Festival. The contest concept was initiated by Bob Barancik. The cash awards are provided by the Blake+Barancik Design Group, Inc.

Prizes

• There will be up to four Student awards of $100.00 each. There will be awards in each category (essay and new media). The teachers of students winners will each receive a gift card of $50 to use for school supplies. 
• There will be an official awards ceremony on Tuesday, April 17 at St. Petersburg History Museum during the SunLit Festival where checks and certificates will be presented to the winners. (Time TBA) 
• Winning essays and digital media will be featured on the artnothate.com, keepstpetelit.org, spmoh.com websites and possibly other appropriate online venues. 
• All entrants retain the copyrights to their original creative entries but permit Keep St. Pete Lit to use the material for relevant educational and promotional purposes.

Please carefully review these links before starting your creative process:

• Universal Babe: Documentary Trailer
• Babe Ruth and the Holocaust: Jewish News Service Article
• Babe Ruth The Humanitarian: Northeast Journal article by Will Michaels

Direct any additional questions to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com. Please put “Questions / Babe Ruth Hero” in subject line.

Entry Form

Baseball legend Babe Ruth was a hero in off the baseball field. He worked to help set up baseball teams for African-American kids. During World War II, Babe Ruth courageously joined other Americans to speak out on behalf of European Jews during the Holocaust. He supported African American baseball players in the 1940s.

Tell us about the time you stood up to injustice. What does it take to speak up and speak out about something you know is wrong? Has anyone ever stood up or spoken out to help you or your family? What would you do to make a difference?

Tell us your ideas and your stories. You may submit a written essay, a podcast, or a short video.

ESSAYS

• If possible, please use Arial 12 pt. type font, double-spaced.
• Your essay should be between 500 and 1,000 words.
• Your essay will be judged on your ideas and creativity.
• At the end of the essay, please add your name, age, grade, name of your teacher or advisor, and her/his preferred phone number and email.
• Please submit your essay as a PDF.

Email your PDF to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com. Please put “Babe Ruth Hero/Essay” in the subject line.


PODCASTS AND VIDEOS
Videos and Podcasts will judged on your ideas and creativity, and how well you use digital technology.

• Your video or podcast must between two and three minutes long.
• Please display your name, age, grade, name of teacher or advisor, and her/his preferred phone number as a screen credit at end of entry or as a spoken word audio credit for podcasts.
• For video submissions, email a YouTube link to BabeRuthHero@gmail.com. Please write “Babe Ruth Hero/Video” in the subject line.

Submit podcast entries as an MP3 file attached to an email. Please put “Babe Ruth Hero/Podcast” in the subject line.

Young Voices & Visions

A moving series of videos produced produced by 6th and 7th Graders that creatively explores difficult societal issues facing America.

Voices of Faith & Doubt

An eclectic short video that mixes the 23rd Psalm and excerpts from Ecclesiastes.

Postcards From Hell

The Warsaw Ghetto remembered through art, poetry, and scholarly essays.

Jan Karski: Messenger of the Holocaust and Warsaw Ghetto

Saving Remnants

A short award-winning video that explores the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto through dance, piano music, and art.

The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Altruism in Extremes

With the passing of more and more elderly direct survivors we who are spiritual survivors of the Shoah must assume greater-than-ever responsibility for the character and impact of the Holocaust Narrative we pass along. Read more

Introduction

With the passing of more and more elderly direct survivors we who are spiritual survivors of the Shoah must assume greater-than-ever responsibility for the character and impact of the Holocaust Narrative we pass along. For nearly 70 years since the war’s end we have emphasized the Nazi Story, one of unforgivable Horror. At great cost to our grasp of history and our self-esteem we have minimized attention to the Jewish Story, that of the remarkable effort of victims to help one another despite fierce Nazi opposition to any evidence of the humanity of “sub-humans.” It is time to rebalance attention, and renew Holocaust education and memorialization content; we owe this to the 6 million, to our progeny to our religious faith, and to posterity. – Art Shostak (Bio)

Summary by Theresa Willingham

In his essay “The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Altruism in Extremes” (Philadelphia Jewish Voice, April 2011), Dr. Arthur Shostak, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Drexel University, calls for a new, more powerful and sustaining way to frame the Holocaust story, one that puts a higher emphasis on the strength of character and spirit that guided the Jewish people through the atrocities of the time.

Dr. Shostak’s work focuses on “Stealth Altruism,” also the title of his upcoming book, which looks at the myriad ways that concentration camp prisoners and others defied the inhumanity thrust upon them in countless subtle but powerful ways. He cites examples of people shielding one another from capture, at risk to their own lives; of teens in Terezin who, despite sure death sentences, created a literary magazine that focused on everything but life in the concentration camp; adults who created an informal university with over 500 lecturers (of whom less than 200 survived) and more than 2400 “courses.”

These instances of human perseverance and strength of character under the most inhumane of conditions, Dr. Shostak believes, create a far greater and more enduring story on which to build and sustain a religious and cultural future. Without refocusing the Jewish collective memory on a more positive and uplifting story of the Holocaust, Dr. Shostak believes the Jewish community is in danger of what Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse calls “substituting a cult of martyrdom for the Torah's insistence on life.”

Dr. Shostak believes Rachel Korazim, director of Education at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum, sums the problem up well when she says, “We’ve managed to place images like barbed wire and crematoria as central Jewish images. This is not Jewish history, this is Nazi history.”

“In the very near future the last of the direct survivors (and perpetrators) of the 1933-1946 Holocaust will pass away,” Dr. Shostak writes. “In the aftermath we will inherit responsibility for shaping a fresh telling of the greatest crime of the 20th century, a persuasive re-telling that should lend a special meaning to 21st century life. We could break with memorialization tradition and adopt a new approach, one that emphasizes not the Horror of Nazi insanity, but instead the Help that victims shared with one another. Were we to do so Jews here and elsewhere would finally understand how very much we have to be proud of in the record of our co-religionists in extremis.”

Relevant Links

The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Altruism in Extremes
The Holocaust: Crimes, Heroes and Villains
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Reimagining the Museum at Auschwitz

Illuminating the Spirit

Art speaks to us of spirit. This is a major theme of Bob Barancik’s Art Not Hate, a multimedia exhibit at the Carrollwood Cultural Center in November and December, 2010. In the photo, Adrienne Hutelmyer and Paul Berg, Executive Director, examine a portrait of Raoul Wallenberg from the exhibit.

Some individuals, like Wallenberg, live forever as examples of the greatness of the human spirit. Wallenberg was a Swedish architect and businessman, recruited in 1944 for a rescue mission to help the Hungarian Jews. He was given a minor diplomatic post in Budapest, and used it to pass out fake passports—even to people already in detention—and provide refuge in buildings that he declared to be Swedish property. He saved the lives of about 15,000 people.

Wallenberg’s own fate remains a mystery. He was detained by the Russians in 1945 and is believed to have died in Lubyanka prison in 1947.

Spirit Figures

The figures in Barancik’s paintings are stripped down to their essence—they are glowing energy fields, standing against a background of darkness and chaos. These works amplify the difference between life and an environment that seeks to deny it. Mary Ellen Bitner (left) and Evelyn Bless examine two of these spirit works, each depicting three figures that draw strength from each other against the emptiness around them.

Integrity

We all need examples of how to live life with integrity. In the photo, artist Bob Barancik and Mary Ellen Bitner, Art Curator, look at two portraits of people who spoke out about the human condition: Jan Karski and Andrei Sakharov.

Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic, was a resistance leader who entered the Jewish ghettos to observe first-hand what was taking place. In 1942, he was the first person to report to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the slaughter of Jews in Poland. He continued to urge heads of state to act; at the time, no one would listen to him.

Andrei Sakharov, known as the father of the Russian atomic bomb, became a spokesperson for human rights and against development of atomic weapons. Despite official Soviet opposition, Sakharov spoke out about the dangers of totalitarianism. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

For more information on the Carrollwood Cultural Center, see www.carrollwoodcenter.org. For information on upcoming art shows at the Center, see www.carrollwoodcenter.org/art-exhibits.html.

Iconoclastic artists and intellectuals often have their ears to the ground, nostrils sniffing the wind, and eyes scanning the horizon…or sidewalk for pennies. It is often an uncomfortable lifestyle. But it does serve a useful societal function. Image-makers in a digital age can readily communicate their unease, anxieties, speculations to a global audience through the internet. It is a truism that highly creative people often view the world through childlike eyes and are prone to state the obvious. In the classic childhood fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it was a little boy (not the prosperous and serious courtiers) who yelled “the emperor is naked!” Perhaps truth telling is connected to arrested social development and not knowing when to shut up. Nearly four years ago, I was at a wonderful concert at the Palladium Theater in St. Pete featuring pianist Paul Wilborn and his sizzling songstress. Their rendition of “You Give Me Fever” just about burnt the house down. It certainly got me to thinking about sex…and the burning of fossil fuels…and perhaps doing a slightly titillating video on the subject of global warming. The legal complications and expenses of trying to use Peggy Lee’s hit standard of “Fever” put it out of bounds for an indie artist/producer like myself. It was easier and a lot more fun to hire my longtime music mavens Phyllis Chapell and Dan Kleiman in Philly to make some new music. I chose a hot Latin sound and name (Mundo Caliente: It’s a Hot World!) for the project. My video-magician in Rochester Dave Puls and digital print guru Brad Erickson in St. Pete also jumped into this hot creative world. We created an award-winning video that was screened at numerous international film festivals over the last several years, as well as a series of 30 striking digital prints. In the print series, I never liked nine of the images and refrained from exhibiting them. They made me genuinely uncomfortable. There was a hellish quality to them. Likewise, there is a hellish quality to our national addiction to Gulf of Mexico deepwater rigs and despotic Middle East oil. The out-of-control spills and fires, resource wars, episodes of epic corporate and governmental incompetence, and the global reality of smog-choked cities together create a devilishly depressing vision. I look at the images at the side of this blog and am genuinely surprised what my unconscious mind painted years ago. These images are evocative warnings of today’s predicament. As the great cartoonist, Walt Kelly, said through his alter-ego Pogo character over 40 years ago: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Below are links to key articles and imagery about the BP gusher-oil slick: Top Florida Marine Biologist does Q&A (Florida Thinks website) Controlled burn of BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico (YouTube) View of oil slick from low flying airplane (YouTube) Is Climate Change Worth Tackling? A Reply To Jim Manzi (The Atlantic magazine) Deepwater Explosion and key photo (Wikipedia) Action is the Antidote to Despair: A photographer confronts the BP oil disaster (YES! Magazine)

For most of its collective history, American Jewry has enjoyed the full benefits of all that this nation has offered to those immigrant groups seeking a freer and better life. Unlike their European experience, Jews in America did not have to face the wrath of an established anti-Jewish religion or the whims of a government or national leader who decided they were no longer a part of the “nation.”

Sarah E. Gerard

A way to express what matters to them; a creative solution to real conflict. This is what students at The Hillel School of Tampa found recently in art, not hate.

For the last two months, Fine Art and Judaic Studies middle school students at the Hillel School of Tampa have been working on “social commentary” art — that which encourages its creator to interpret the world he or she lives in, not just portray it. The unit began after middle school students visited the “Art Not Hate” exhibit at the Florida Holocaust Museum this past March. They were intrigued by the theme of “creative solutions to conflict.” The students were asked to reinterpret the exhibit’s focus on the Holocaust and Post-Holocaust genocides, and apply it to their own 21st-century lives.

When they returned to school, students were asked to think of an issue that was important to them. This is what your art class will center around for the next two months, Hillel art teacher Debra Campbell told her students. One student, Matthew, picked fear. Shelby picked nutrition in America. Yoni picked racism. All of the students worked hard to transcend the surface of their topic, communicating the emotions that lie beneath.

“It was really hard for them to see the difference between graphic art and (fine) art,” said Campbell, “something that will evoke an emotion rather than just tell the audience literally how to view the artwork.”

Campbell let students use whatever materials they wanted — a carry-over from the workshops that inspired the idea.

Campbell had worked with Barancik a few months beforehand at the Art Not Hate workshops at Creative Clay, a St. Petersburg organization providing equal access to art education for disabled citizens. The workshops were designed to teach problem-solving skills to middle- and high-school students by promoting understanding through artistic interaction. Campbell just so happened to be launching her social commentary unit at the time and wasn’t sure how she wanted to approach the topic.

The Art Not Hate workshops jived perfectly with what she was trying to teach, and she decided to get more involved. When she heard about the exhibit at the Florida Holocaust Museum, she knew what she wanted to do.

Using materials they selected themselves, each students’ artwork was made unique to the issue it surrounded and the emotions it expressed. One student, Nicole, made a torch-shaped sculpture she calls “Sacrifice By Fire.” An homage to lives lost in the Holocaust, Campbell says Nicole’s message is that, “If humanity is not vigilant, it can happen again.”

Talia’s piece, “Words Can Hurt,” is a red and black stand against gossip. Talia chose to make a collage, which allowed her to use a lot of type in her design including phrases like “Did you hear…?” and “She is so…”

After five months of studying the Holocaust in Judaic Studies class, Amy Wasser’s students came back from the “Art Not Hate” exhibit with a focus on the concept of memory. “As Jewish citizens in contemporary America, we have no memories of the Holocaust,” Wasser says, “because we never experienced it. We know we need to remember what happened, lest we let it happen again, but how can we remember something we never experienced?”

Like Campbell, Wassser asked her students to use art as a medium to express their feelings. Each student chose a different topic of memory and created an original piece of art. One student constructed a wooden table, painted with names of victims and splatters of bright red paint. Tiny figurines scatter across the length of the table toward a rainbow pattern, symbolizing freedom. Another student constructed a tree-like sculpture, tall as an eight-year-old, and hung a poem on the wall beside it. Another made a concrete wall with swastikas on it, reminiscent of the walls of the ghettos that kept his ancestors inside.

When they finished their projects, students wanted to test their pieces out in the Rembrandt in Hightops Youth Art Competition, held annually at the Old Hyde Park Gallery in Tampa. They wanted to see if anyone would “get it,” says Campbell — if they had done a good enough job getting below the surface of their topics and still having people viewing it as a work of art.

They had. Out of 15 awards, five of them were given to Hillel students (four of the awards for their social commentary art).

Campbell says she will definitely teach the social commentary unit again in her class, because “using the theme of ‘creative responses to conflict’ enabled the kids to talk about things that were important to them and present them in their own, independent style.

“Rather than teaching techniques and materials,” she says, “this was one time that the kids were able to take everything they learned and turn it into a very personal work of art.”