Lecture Schedule

Monday, April 20
7:15 pm
Holocaust Commemoration Day Memorial Service, Yom Hashoah, sponsored by the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Life

8:00 pm
Robert Goldenberg, Ph.D. (co-sponsored by the Hillel Foundation for Jewish Life)
“National Catastrophe and the History of Jewish Thought”
Jewish perspectives on the covenant and meaning of history since biblical times. Talk will conclude with selected responses to the Shoah.

Thursday, April 23
4:00 pm
Elof Axel Carlson, Ph.D.
“The Awkward Relation of Long Island’s Eugenic Record Office and the Growth of Nazi Race Hygiene”
The aims of the American eugenics movement (1880 to 1945) and how it fed into Nazi race hygiene and Nazi Nuremberg laws.

Tuesday, April 28
4:00 pm
Fred Rosner, M.D.
“Kristallnacht 1938: Personal Experiences and Reflections”
An internationally renowned authority on medical ethics, two weeks after Kristallnacht Dr. Rosner was shipped on the “children's transport” to England, which accepted 10,000 Jewish children to save them from death. Dr. Rosner will provide a powerful personal and professional perspective on the Holocaust.

Monday, May 4
4:00 pm
Stephen G. Post, Ph.D.
“Human ‘Perfectibility’ and Biological Redesign: A Reflection on Human Dignity”
Asking hard questions about the goals of a posthumanist vision as we increasingly gain biological power over both nature and human nature.

Tuesday, May 5
4:00 pm
Dean Richard N. Fine, M.D.
“Physicians Can Build Bridges to Prevent Future Atrocities: Experiences in Poland During the Communist Era”
Dr. Fine will provide perspectives informed by his visits to sites of the Nazi death camps.

Wednesday, May 6
4:00 pm
Stephen Spector, Ph.D.
“Christian Zionism and the Holocaust”
Evangelical Zionists’ understandings of the Holocaust and its place in their current attitudes toward Israel. Also conservative Christians’ beliefs that we are now re-enacting the events that led up to World War II.

Monday, May 11
4:00 pm
Sara Lipton, Ph.D.
“Christian Polemic and Jewish Difference in the Middle Ages”
This talk argues that understandings of Jewish identity arise out of medieval Christian culture, but in spite of certain resemblances to Nazi propaganda, cannot be likened to modern “racial” anti-Semitism.

Tuesday, May 12
4:00 pm
Eva Kittay, Ph.D.
“T-4, Mental Disability, and the Meaning of Racism”
The earliest victims of gassings under the Nazi regime were German adults and children with mental disabilities. What can we learn about the nature of racism from this treatment of those with mental disabilities?

Monday, May 18
4:00 pm
Kraig Larkin
“The Ambivalence of Racial Hygiene”
In pursuit of racial purity, the Nazis regulated corrupting substances such as tobacco and alcohol and many Germans exhibited ambivalence toward certain aspects of the party’s racial ideology.