International Best-Selling Author Presents Keynote Address at Colorado State’s Holocaust Awareness Week

Note to Editors: Reporters interested in speaking with Daniel Goldhagen for a phone interview should contact Lisa Cantrup or Hedy Berman of Hillel at (970) 491-2080.

International best-selling author Daniel Goldhagen will deliver the keynote address at Colorado State University’s Students for Holocaust Awareness Week. Goldhagen will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 28, in the North Ballroom of the Lory Student Center. His address is part of the university’s tenth annual Holocaust Awareness Week that runs from Feb. 27-March 3.

Goldhagen is the author of the No. 1 international bestseller, "Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." The book is credited with generating more international discussion of the Holocaust than any book in recent history.

His most current text, "A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair," is a penetrating moral inquiry into the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust. "A Moral Reckoning" has been hailed as "a monumental achievement" by the Sunday Times of London and as "masterly…one of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark" by the New York Times.  

The title of Goldhagen’s presentation is "From Justice to Moral Repair."

Goldhagen holds a doctorate in political science from Harvard and is currently a member of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is the winner of Germany’s highly prestigious triennial Democracy Prize.

Colorado State’s theme for this year’s Holocaust Awareness Week is "Justice, Justice Thou Shall Pursue," in remembrance of Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, dedicated his life to documenting Holocaust crimes and hunting down perpetrators. As founder and head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, the freelance Nazi hunter, usually with the cooperation of the Israeli, Austrian, former West German and other governments, ferreted out nearly 1,100 Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, founded in the late 1970s, is an international Jewish human rights organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust by fostering tolerance and understanding through community involvement, educational outreach and social action. It is headquartered in Los Angeles and maintains offices in New York, Toronto, Miami, Jerusalem, Paris and Buenos Aires.

Because this year’s events are dedicated to the memory of Wiesenthal, Goldhagen’s presentation will begin with a brief appreciation of Wiesenthal’s search for justice without vengeance.

"Nazi hunter, the prefix attached to Wiesenthal’s name, was always the wrong image," Goldhagen has said of Wiesenthal. "Wiesenthal’s was not an act of ferocity or retribution – and certainly not of the kill – but of repair, in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam: repairing the world. After crimes, especially those that assault an entire people, a man calling the criminals to legal account for their actions is not a hunter but a righteous man of justice, punishing perpetrators whom others would let go free, bringing resolution to abandoned survivors and keeping the focus on individual responsibility that others routinely deny."

In his presentation, Goldhagen will use Wiesenthal as a springboard for considering justice and expand the notion of what people should be seeking: More than justice; namely repair.

"Repair is the attempt to make amends with victims and their families as best one can for the harm one did to them. The three components of repair are material, political and moral," he said of his planned presentation at Colorado State. Goldhagen plans to apply the idea of repair to the Catholic Church as an exemplary case study.

Holocaust Awareness Week at Colorado State is funded by Associated Students of Colorado State University, Hillel of Colorado, Association for Student Activity Programming, Women at Noon and the Bohemian Foundation.

All Holocaust Awareness Week events are free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Hillel at Colorado State at (970) 491-2080 or visit http://csu.hillelcolorado.org.

Parking for evening events is available in a campus lot north of the Lory Student Center. This lot may be accessed by turning south off Laurel Street onto Meldrum Avenue. Due to construction, the Lory Student Center must be accessed by walking through the north entrance of the Engineering Building. Signs will direct people to Holocaust Awareness Week events.

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