Steven Fischler, co-director and producer of “From Swastika to Jim Crow,” will screen his film on Thursday, February 14 at 10 a.m. in the H-wing Auditorium (H-129) at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The program will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

First released in 2000, the documentary explores the similarities between Nazism in Germany (the Swastika) and racism in the American south (Jim Crow). In 1933, the Nazi government expelled Jewish scholars from German universities. Many of them found teaching positions in Southern universities, where they sympathized with the plight of their African-American colleagues and students. The horrors of prejudice became a common thread that could bind these exiled Jewish professors with their black students and colleagues. The film pairs shocking archival footage of the KKK dressed in costume and carrying torches with footage of Nazi salutes and marching German soldiers to compare the barbarity of both ideologies.