Description:

3/18/20 - We are so sorry, but this event has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We wish everyone good health and community strength.

In Passing on the Wand, Eva Hoffman will reflect on the role and perspective of the post-Holocaust generation in extending our understanding of that history-altering event. As the generation of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust passes on, the task of both their direct heirs, and the larger “second generation,” is to move from personal memory to the investigation of history on the one hand; and at the same time, to incorporate our knowledge of more recent developments and events into our attempts to grapple with the causes of collective atrocity, and its possible prevention.

Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, before emigrating in her teens to Canada and then the United States. After receiving her PhD in literature from Harvard University, she worked as senior editor and literary critic at The New York Times, and has taught at various British and American universities. Her books, which have been translated widely, include Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, After Such Knowledge and Time, as well as two novels, The Secret and Illuminations. She has written and presented programs for BBC Radio and has lectured internationally on subjects of exile, historical memory, cross-cultural relations and other contemporary issues. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award for Writing, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Prix Italia for Radio. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and holds an honorary doctorate from Warwick University. She is currently a Visiting Professor at UCL and lives in London.

Co-presented with the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, this talk is part of the Kaplan Institute's Memorializing Dialogue and is the Foundation's 2020 Theodore Zev Weiss Annual Lecture.

____________________________________________

The 2019-2020 Humanities Dialogue: MEMORIALIZING

A year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.

What stories do monuments tell?
When is remembrance also a repression?
How does memorializing shape the present?
How do we negotiate collective and disputed memories?

Presented in partnership with multiple Northwestern departments and programs, the Memorializing Dialogue will include talks by distinguished scholars and artists from different disciplinary perspectives.