For 28 years, the Tenenbaum Family Lecture in Judaic Studies has given Emory community members the chance to delve into topics as diverse as the experiences of Cuban Jews across the diaspora, Jewish environmental ethics and the dilemmas of ultra-orthodox individuals who explore the digital world.
This year, for the first time, an Emory graduate, Holocaust scholar Avinoam Patt, will stand at the podium.
Patt will lecture on “Israel and the Holocaust: Changing Landscapes of Memory” on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m. The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies hosts the event, set for Michael C. Carlos Museum’s Ackerman Hall. Advance registration is required for the free, public talk.
Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University (NYU) and Ingeborg H. and Ira Leon Rennert Director of the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Emory’s Department of Religion in 1997 with a concentration in Judaic Studies before going on to NYU for his doctorate in Hebrew and Judaic studies and modern European history. He has authored or co-authored multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, the most recent of which is “Israel and the Holocaust.”
The annual Tenenbaum Lecture coincides this year with an academic conference exploring similar themes. Emory is collaborating with the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University to host “Holocaust Memory in the 21st Century,” a three-day conference organized by Alicjia Podbielska, visiting assistant professor of Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies. The conference convenes Holocaust studies experts and educators from across the country.
It is significant that Emory is offering both the academic conference and the public lecture, says Hazel Gold, Judith London Evans Interim Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies.
“The entire question of Holocaust education has really taken on particular significance for many of us at the present moment,” she says, “on the one hand, because the number of survivors is dwindling rapidly. And, unfortunately, because there is much misinformation and Holocaust denial circulating on places like social media. It is important that the academic study of the Holocaust continue in a robust form, and it’s meaningful that Emory is hosting two events exemplifying that scholarship.”
Gold is also an associate professor of Spanish and a core faculty member of the Tam Institute.
Founded in 1997, the Tenenbaum lecture’s blue and gold roots run deep. Samuel Tenenbaum, a 1965 Emory graduate, established the endowment supporting the series.
He did so to honor his father, the late Meyer W. Tenenbaum, and the entire Tenenbaum family. The elder Tenenbaum, a native of Poland, arrived in the United States at age 13 knowing no English. Eleven years later, he graduated from Emory School of Law. He went on to found Chatham Steel Corporation, now a major steel service company headquartered in Savannah.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Emory University Chaplaincy’s Jewish Life program, the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Hightower Fund and the departments of German Studies, History, Religion and Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies.