JAMES E. YOUNG, MEMBER OF GERMANY'S NATIONAL HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL COMMISSION, WILL SPEAK AT BARD COLLEGE ON APRIL 17
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY-The Jewish Studies, Art History, and Religion Programs, and the Chaplaincy and Jewish Students Organization at Bard College present a talk by James E. Young on the subject of "Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Holocaust Monument," on Tuesday, April 17. The talk, two days before Yom HaShoah, (Holocaust Remembrance Day), is free and open to the public and will begin at 7:00 p.m., in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building.
In 1997, the Berlin Senate named Young-the only non-German and Jewish appointee-to a five-member commission to select the design for Germany's national Holocaust Memorial. In 1999, American architect Peter Eisenman's design for the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" was finally approved by the German Parliament after a heated debate. Young, in his recently released book, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, tells for the first time the inside story of Germany's national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it.
James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and is currently chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He has also taught at New York University as Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies, at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California.
Young is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust and The Texture of Memory (which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994). He was the guest curator of the exhibition The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History at the Jewish Museum in New York City, (with venues in Berlin and Munich) and editor of the exhibition catalogue.
His articles and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, New Literary History, Partisan Review, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Annales, SAQ, History and Theory, Harvard Design Magazine, History and Memory, The Forward, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Jewish Quarterly, Tikkun, New York Times Magazine and Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Slate, among dozens of other journals and collected volumes. His writings have been published in German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, and Swedish editions.
Young is the recipient of numerous awards, including Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships; grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and American Philosophical Society; and a Yad Hanadiv Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
For further information, call Rona Sheramy at 845-758-7090 or e-mail [email protected].
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