Wyman Institute Update: June 12, 2003
- We are pleased to inform you that the Hon. Stephen J. Solarz has joined the Advisory Committee of the Wyman Institute. He served for eighteen years in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was a leader in the effort to promote the cause of democracy and human rights around the world and to help beleaguered Jewish communities in Syria, Yemen, Iran, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. He is presently vice chairman of the International Crisis Group, which endeavors to prevent genocide and other atrocities in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Indonesia.
- We are likewise pleased to welcome Prof. Marc Raider, who has joined the Academic Council of the Wyman Institute. He is chairman of the Judaic Studies Program and Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University at Albany (SUNY), as well as founder and director of the Center for Jewish Studies there.
- An essay by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff, “Bob Hope and the Holocaust: No Laughing Matter,” appeared in the Heritage Florida Jewish News and the National Jewish Post & Opinion on June 6. Timed to coincide with Hope’s 100th birthday, it recounted how Hope and other celebrities took part in a 1944 event to raise funds for Peter Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.
In addition, Dr. Medoff’s essay concerning President Bush’s recent visit to Auschwitz appeared in the Detroit Jewish News, the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, and the Connecticut Jewish Ledger on June 6.
- Academic Council member Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was the featured speaker at a community-wide event organized by the Columbus (Ohio) Board of Rabbis and other local Jewish organizations on the eve of Yom HaShoah. The following day, Dr. Zuroff spoke at Kenyon College’s Yom HaShoah Holocaust Memorial Program on “The Ongoing Quest to Bring Perpetrators of the Holocaust to Justice.”
- ‘Inside of Time’, the latest book by Wyman Institute Advisory Committee member Dr. Ruth Gruber, was reviewed recently in the Los Angeles Times by Prof. Blanche Wiesen Cook.