Wyman Institute Update: June 24, 2003
- We are pleased to inform you that the Hon. Martin Frost, U.S. Representative from Texas, has joined the Advisory Committee of the Wyman Institute.
- A Father’s Day essay by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff and associate director Dov Fischer, Esq., “Their Father Was an Unsung Hero of the Holocaust,” appeared in the Norwich (Connecticut) Bulletin on June 15 and the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California on June 13. It described the efforts of the Bingham family of Connecticut to raise public awareness about the heroism of their father, Hiram Bingham IV. As a U.S. consular official in France in 1940-1941, Bingham worked with Varian Fry, in defiance of the State Department, to provide visas and other protective documents to refugees. Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, and Lion Feuchtwanger were among the individuals whom Fry and Bingham saved.
- Academic Council member Prof. Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, will be teaching a two-week graduate seminar on Holocaust Literature for the Department of English at the University of Kansas.
- Academic Council member Prof. David Weinberg, of Wayne State University, authored “Between America and Israel: The Quest for a Distinct European Jewish Identity in the Post-War Era,” in the Summer 2002 issue of Jewish Culture and History, and “Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Response on the European Continent in the Immediate Postwar Era,” in New Records – New Perspectives: Lectures on the Holocaust, the Birth of Israel and the Contemporary Middle East, ed. Shlomo Aronson (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2002). In addition, Prof. Weinberg lectured on “The Strange Alliance: Anti-Zionist and Antisemitic Rhetoric in Contemporary France,” at a conference on “The New Antisemitism,” Arizona State University, February 2003, and on “Issues in Post-war European Jewish Recovery,” at a seminar at the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, in April 2003.
- Academic Council member Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, traveled to Australia in May on a lecture tour hosted by the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Committee and local Jewish organizations. He spoke in Perth,Melbourne, and Sydney, as well as to pupils in local Jewish schools, and gave numerous interviews to the media. On the way to Australia, Dr. Zuroff also lectured to students at the King David School in Johannesburg, briefed the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, and was interviewed on the “Jenny Crwys Williams Show,” one of the most popular radio shows in South Africa.