Clark Center to remember Holocaust

04/19/2022 

SUNY Cortland’s Clark Center for Global Engagement will welcome three visiting lecturers to campus and a dramatic presentation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Week from April 26 to 30.

All of the events, unless otherwise noted, are free and open to the public online.

“The events are all a part of a general goal of raising global awareness and alerting audiences to different ways to think about social justice,” said Professor of History Scott Moranda, the Clark Center’s acting director and a scholar of European history.

• David Graizbord, a historian of modern Judaism, will lecture on “Jewish Identity in the U.S. and Beyond: What Do Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Zionism Have to Do with It? And Why Should You Care?” at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 26. Graizbord, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for Judaic Studies,  is the author of published research on Jewish ethnic identity and Zionism among American Jews. His book, The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish National Identity, and Israel, was issued by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. For more information and a Webex link, contact Nance Wilson.
• Ann Kirschner, a faculty member with the City University of New York, will read from and discuss her memoir Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27. The event will take place in Sperry Center, Room 106. Sala’s Gift is based on about 350 letters her mother, Sala, had secreted away during her five years in Nazi labor camps. The letters provide a rare insight into the lives of imprisoned Jews during a horrific time. For more information, and a link, contact Howard Lindh.

  
  

• Holly Case, a professor of history at Brown University, will give a virtual lecture on “What Hungarian Politics Reveal About Our Times” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 28. Case, a historian of modern Europe, will speak on nationalism and illiberalism in today’s Hungary and place recent developments in their historical context. Her recent columns on Hungarian politics were published in journals and newspapers such as The Guardian and Jewish Quarterly. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War Two, was published in May 2009. In 2018, she released The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond  (Princeton University Press). For more information, contact Moranda. The above title serves as the link.
• The university’s Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee will present their production of “Letter to Sala,” a play drawn from Ann Kirschner’s memoir, 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 30, in Old Main, Brown Auditorium. For more information and a link, contact Lindh.

The week also is sponsored by the university’s International Studies Program, the Project on Eastern and Central Europe, the Center for Gender and Intercultural Studies, Jewish Studies and Hillel at SUNY Cortland, with additional support from a Campus Artist and Lecture Series Grant.

Above left image courtesy of Pixabay.