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We are very pleased to announce that our keynote
speaker on Thursday, May 24, will be author Helen Epstein. The daughter
of Holocaust survivors from Prague, Helen Epstein is a noted lecturer on
memoir and biography, author of five books of non-fiction and an
affiliate of Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Her
Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters
of Survivors (Penguin, 1979) explores the continuing effects of the
Holocaust on survivors and their families and has been justly praised by
the Chicago Tribune as “an enormous achievement, heart wrenching
and unforgettable,” and by the Los Angeles Sunday Times as “a
passionate, brilliantly illuminating book.” Her most recent book,
Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History
(Holmes & Meier, 2005), provides us with, in the words of Eva Hoffman,
“fascinating glimpses of a still unfamiliar world, with its complex
history, its hopes, its vicissitudes, and its tragic end.” It is, says
Elie Wiesel, “a literary pilgrimage to her past that will move and
enrich our quest for memory and understanding.” Helen's latest
published work incorporating the pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish
world in Central Europe is an essay (“Swimming Against Stereotype: The
Story of a Twentieth Century Jewish Athlete”) on her sportsman father,
who played water polo for Czechoslovakia in the Berlin Olympics of 1936.
It is available on
www.amazon.com and as a slide presentation by its author. |
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Keynote Speaker for Saturday, May 26
We are very pleased to announce that in addition
to the keynote address by Helen Epstein on Thursday, May 24, the 2007
Legacy of the Holocaust Conference will feature a second keynote
address, “Auschwitz in the Back Yard: Polish Artists and the Holocaust,”
on Saturday, May 26. Our keynote speaker on May 26 will be Stephen C.
Feinstein, Director of the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota (http://www.chgs.umn.edu).
Stephen Feinstein is Professor
Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, where he
taught from 1969-1999, and has been teaching the History of the
Holocaust since 1975. He was curator of the traveling art exhibition,
“Witness and Legacy: Contemporary Art about the Holocaust,” at the
Minnesota Museum of American Art, which toured in 17 American museums
from 1995-2002. In 1999, he was curator of a 7,000 square foot
exhibition at the University of Minnesota's Nash Gallery,
"Absence/Presence: The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide.”
Stephen Feinstein has more than 40 published articles and is the
co-editor, with Karen Schierman and Marcia Sachs Littell, of
Confronting the Holocaust: A Mandate for the 21st Century: Proceedings
of the 27th Annual (1996) Scholars’ Conference on the German Churches
and the Holocaust (University Press of America, 1998). His latest
edited book is Absence/Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic
Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press, 2005).
He is currently writing a monograph, Spaces with Ghosts: Installation
Art about the Holocaust. Stephen Feinstein serves as guest curator
for the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg and was a plenary
speaker in June 2006 at Yad Vashem’s Annual Conference. |
