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The Dartmouth
July 17, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Wiesel highlights Holocaust series

Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel will give a keynote address at an international conference on the Holocaust to be held at Dartmouth from Oct. 22 to 24.

The conference, titled "Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization and Denial" will feature a speech by Wiesel and presentations by scholars from the United States and abroad.

"The conference will include presentations of the latest scholarship on the Holocaust as well as workshops looking into how the Holocaust is taught," History Professor Leo Spitzer said.

Spitzer and History Professor Michael Ermarth comprised the on-site planning committee and have been involved with the project for more than a year.

The conference is the third in a series sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation, who invited Dartmouth to be its co-sponsor this year. The College will be the first educational institution outside Chicago to host the event.

The highlight of the three-day conference is the keynote address by Wiesel, a world-renown author and this year's Class of 1930 Fellow. Wiesel is most famous for his book "Night," an account of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

Wiesel's lecture, titled "The Assault on Memory," will begin at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday Oct. 23 in Spaulding Auditorium.

Although the lecture is free and open to the public, a ticket is required for admission. The Rockefeller Center, a co-sponsor of the lecture, will offer advance tickets to Dartmouth students, faculty, administrators and staff on Oct. 20 and 21 in the Rockefeller Center from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m.

General admission tickets will be available at the Hopkins Center Box Office on Oct. 23 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.

"The lecture is likely to draw a sizable audience, but it is still unclear whether tickets will be in high demand and hard to come by," said Roxanne Waldner, assistant director of the Rockerfeller Center.

Spitzer said if the lecture will be broadcast by closed circuit television to Loew Auditorium if Spaulding fills to capacity.

In addition to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Wiesel has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award.

College President James Freedman will introduce Wiesel.

On Saturday Oct. 22, faculty and students will perform in the Dartmouth Players Bench Reading of "The Table: A Play in Four Voices and Basso Ostinato" by Ida Fink. The performance will take place in the Hopkins Center's Warner Bentley Theater.

The Holocaust Education Foundation was founded in Chicago in the mid-1980s in response to individuals claiming the Holocaust never occurred.

The foundation, which was established with support from various Jewish philanthropies and supporters in the Chicago area, expanded into a nationwide effort, Ermarth said.

In addition to the denial by those who Ermarth called "kooky" Holocaust deniers, the Foundation began to explore the different layers of denial.

"There is a psychological denial instinct -- a human need to deny what is incomprehensible and totally at odds with our sense of humanity and decency," he said. The Foundation has confronted this issue, especially in its relation to the education of youth, he added.

An initial organizational committee, including Spitzer, Ermarth and the president of the Foundation, determined this year's theme. The committee then identified a number of topics and leading scholars in those areas.

To address the issue of education, the committee invited veteran teachers and others who use new media, such as film and oral testimony, to teach the subject, Spitzer said.

Other panels will address facets of the Holocaust that have been overlooked, such as gender issues and the lives of Jewish children after the war.

The conference will also include a presentation of new evidence about the Holocaust which surfaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"We are now looking at the Holocaust with the distance of half a century," Ermarth said. Reflecting upon the rapid disappearance of the generation of Holocaust survivors, Ermarth added, "This is one of our last chances to get the story straight."