FAU Presents the Elie Wiesel Memorial Symposium

by FAU College of Arts and Letters | Wednesday, Jan 11, 2017

FAU will present the "Elie Wiesel Memorial Symposium: A Celebration of Wiesel's Life and Work" on Sunday, Feb. 5 from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The event will take place in the University Theatre, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus, and is free and open to the public. No reservations are required and more information can be found at 561-297-2979.

Eight scholars from around the country who have served as members of the Readers Committee for the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest will talk about each of their collaborations with Wiesel, discuss books they have written about Wiesel, as well as related subjects:

  • Alan L. Berger: "Elie Wiesel and Jewish/Christian Relations." Berger is FAU's Raddock Family eminent scholar chair for Holocaust studies and professor of Judaic studies. Among his books are "Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction, Judaism in the Modern World," and "Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust." The latter book includes a foreword by Wiesel.
  • Judith Ginsberg: "Elie Wiesel's Ethics Contest: 25 Years of Reading Essays for Elie." Ginsberg has served for more than 25 years as executive director of foundations dedicated to Jewish philanthropy. As the founding executive director of The Covenant Foundation in 1990, she established awards and grants to honor excellence and innovation in Jewish education in the United States.
  • Barbara Helfgott Hyett: "Is It Possible to be Seated and Yet To Dance: Life Lessons Of My Formidable Teacher, Elie Wiesel." Poet, professor and public lecturer, Hyett has published five collections of poetry including "In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps," which is based on interviews with U.S. service members. She taught English at the Teachers as Scholars program at Harvard, MIT, Trinity College and Boston University, and is currently the director of PoemWorks, the Workshop for Publishing Poets in Chestnut Hill, Mass.
  • Carolyn Johnston: "Moments of Grace: Remembering Elie Wiesel as a Teacher." Johnston is a professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.  She is a specialist in American intellectual history, the history of radical and working class movements, and the history of women in America. For 24 years, she co-taught a winter term course with Wiesel.  She also has been on the Elie Wiesel Foundation Ethics Contest Reading Committee for many years.
  • Henry Knight: "When the Rainbow Breaks." Knight is professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and the director of the Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in Keene, N.H. Knight is also co-chair of the biennial Steven S. Weinstein Holocaust Symposium that he and Leonard Grob of Fairleigh Dickenson University co-founded in 1996.  
  • David Patterson: "What is Elie Wiesel's Message for the Winners of the Essay Contest?"  Patterson holds the Hillel A. Feinberg Chair in Holocaust Studies in the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.  He serves as the series editor of the Antisemitism Series at the Academic Studies Press, as well as the co-editor with John K. Roth, of the Weinstein Series in Post-Holocaust Studies at the University of Washington Press. 
  • Alan Rosen: "Tefillin in Auschwitz - and Everywhere." Rosen was born and raised in Los Angeles and was educated in Boston under the direction of Wiesel. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including "Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary and Moral Perspectives" and "Literature of the Holocaust." He was a research fellow of the Foundation Pour la Mémoire de la Shoah from 2006-09 and has held many fellowships, including one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  • John K. Roth: "The Impact of Elie Wiesel." Roth is the Edward J. Sexton professor emeritus of philosophy and the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights) at Claremont McKenna College. Named the 1988 U.S. professor of the year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Roth also has received the Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for Holocaust Studies and Research.

The Elie Wiesel Memorial Symposium is sponsored by FAU's Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies and the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz, along with FAU's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and the Peace, Justice and Human Rights Initiative.



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