CZECH IT OUT Caitlin McCarthy has written a screenplay about Vera Laska, who, as a teenager in Prague during World War II, became part of the Czech resistance against the Nazis. She helped both Jews and non-Jews escape through the underground.

Attorney David Lubell, of Propp, Lubell, and Lapidus, based in Manhattan, said the film’s lead would go to Czech actress Lucie Vondrackova. Beyond appearing on both stage and screen in her home country, Ms. Vondrackova has acted in a number of films that have screened in America. She is filming “Last Holiday” with Gerard Depardieu, and in March, Ms. Vondrackova will star as Joan of Arc in a docudrama on the Hallmark channel.

In March, Mr. Lubell said, New York’s Czech Center on Madison Avenue will honor Ms. Vondrackova’s role in “Joan of Arc” as well as “Vera.”

Ms. McCarthy has known her subject personally for 20 years; Ms. Laska was her sister’s college professor at Regis College in Weston, Mass. While researching the screenplay, Ms. Mc-Carthy interviewed Ms. Laska and read works by both Ms. Laska and Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, who has studied women who have reshaped human rights.

“It is a wonderful and moving story of a young woman’s resistance to tyranny,” Mr. Lubell told the Knickerbocker. “It brings to life a period none of us can afford to forget.” He said the film shows that courage is what makes both life and art meaningful to us.

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G.I. YIVO Vassar professor and author Deborah Dash Moore appeared at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to conduct a seminar on the background and methodology of her new book, “G.I. Jew: How World War II Changed a Generation” (Harvard University Press). The book is based on scores of first-person accounts from Jewish soldiers of “The Greatest Generation.” About half a million Jews fought in World War II.

Among those from YIVO present were Executive Director Carl J. Rheins, Dean of the YIVO Library Brad Hill, and senior research fellow Marek Web. Mr. Web, it turned out, had made a key contribution to the book by pointing Ms. Moore to an invaluable collection of first-person accounts from Jewish G.I.s found in YIVO’s archives. The essays had been submitted to a composition contest that the organization sponsored in 1946. Ms. Moore, who holds the William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair of Religion at Vassar College, also drew on collections of letters and oral histories, including extensive interviews she conducted personally with surviving veterans.

One of the rawest points to emerge in many accounts was the frequency of anti-Semitic attitudes facing Jewish soldiers, from senior American officers and fellow enlisted men alike. Of course, the army was then segregated by race, as President Truman’s executive order to end segregation in the armed forces was issued only after the war.

By the end of the war, Jewish G.I.’s views on themselves, their faith, their country, and how they fit in had changed, Ms. Moore said. “They came out fighters,” she commented, “no longer ready to accept second-class citizenship.” The army taught them to be aggressive, to stand up for themselves as well as their country.

Ms. Moore concluded that their military service made Jews and Judaism democratic. Judaism emerged after the war as one of the three religions defining America, while the Jews themselves came out feeling simultaneously more American and more Jewish.

The seminar, held at the Center for Jewish History, was the first for the spring semester in a series of Faculty and Graduate Seminars in Jewish Studies, organized by YIVO’s chief archivist, Fruma Mohrer. The series is aimed at advanced scholars in the tristate area. Attendees included faculty from Queens College, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University, as well as graduate students and invited independent scholars and researchers.

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VITAL CENTER There’s an old saying that grandparents and grandchildren find rapport in a common opponent. At the CUNY Graduate Center, Ohio University professor Kevin Mattson demonstrated how the same principle may be applied in scholarly and policy communities. Mr. Mattson, who has written for Dissent magazine, spoke about his book “When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Post-War Liberalism” (Routledge).

The book offers a fresh look at the writing of historians C. Vann Woodward and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and examines how they forged a new American liberal tradition in a conservative era.

Mr. Mattson opened his talk by saying how he had come to read Mr. Schlesinger. He said that while was studying American intellectual history at the University of Rochester, his adviser Christopher Lasch suggested he crack open Mr. Schlesinger’s book “The Vital Center.”

Mr. Mattson said that Mr. Schlesinger helped craft a “usable past” for what he labeled “a new and distinct political generation” coming of age after the New Deal.”

“As a young leftist, it was easy to scoff at liberalism’s inadequacies,” Mr. Mattson said. “It was even easier in 1990, when Lasch was putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus, ‘The True and Only Heaven,’ where he ticked off liberalism’s faults. For Lasch, liberalism was naive about progress, had no sense of ‘limits’ or any conception of ‘virtue,’ rejected a ‘heroic conception of life,’ and eventually degenerated into a snotty disdain towards ordinary people.”

Mr. Mattson said that he doesn’t agree with all of Mr. Lasch’s arguments, but reading Mr. Schlesinger’s book “felt like a blow waking me from dogmatic slumber.”

Mr. Mattson said that in “The Vital Center,” he found a liberalism that was tough-minded and nuanced, one that had learned about sin from Reinhold Niebuhr, and required civic virtues and an ethic of responsibility.

“Today, another generation is coming of political age, a generation that didn’t live through the 1960s and the tragedy of the Vietnam War,” Mr. Mattson said. “It’s my own generation, and it could usefully look back to the Cold War liberalism that boomers on the left so vehemently rejected.”

What’s next for Mr. Mattson? He told the Knickerbocker that he is writing an intellectual biography of muckraker Upton Sinclair, who wrote “The Jungle.”