Stuart Eizenstat, former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and a leading expert on issues relating to the Holocaust, will participate in a symposium on the subject on Thursday, April 18, in Pickford Auditorium. The symposium, The Future of Holocaust Education, Holocaust Studies and Post-Holocaust Justice, begins at 2 p.m.
Secretary Eizenstat will also deliver a lecture at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at 6:45 p.m. Both the symposium and the evening lecture are free and open to the public.
During the Clinton administration, Eizenstat served as Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State, successfully negotiating major agreements with the Swiss, French, Germans, and Austrians to compensate Holocaust victims. The negotiations are the subject of this recent book, Imperfect Justice: The Unfinished Business of World War II.
The panel will be moderated by CMC professors and Holocaust scholars John Roth, the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy chair of the department of philosophy and religious studies, and Jonathan Petropoulos, the John Croul Professor of European History and director of CMC's Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. Roth has served on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington and recently co-edited the book Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust. Petropoulos, former research director for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, is the author The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, named one of the 25 Most Memorable Books of 2000 by the New York Public Library.
A number of internationally prominent Holocaust scholars will join the panel, including: Sara Bloomfield, executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Michael Berenbaum, past director of the Center for Advanced Study at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and former director of Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation; Richard Hovanisian, professor of history at UCLA and a scholar on the Armenian genocide; Marilyn Herron, director of the Holocaust Center at Chapman University; and Elazar Barkan, associate professor of history at Claremont Graduate University and author of the book The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices.