Public forum at Wheaton on the nature of forgiveness
Wednesday, September 1999
As part of Wheaton freshmen's ongoing first year seminar program, human rights activist and author Joshua Rubenstein will talk about the Holocaust and the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation in a public lecture at Wheaton College on Wednesday, Sept. 29. The discussion will also feature comments by Ilona Kuphal and Deborah Shelkin Remis, members of One by One, an organization of descendants of the Holocaust and the Third Reich.
The lecture will begin at 5 p.m. in Hindle Auditorium, located in the college's Science Center. It is sponsored by the college's chapter of Amnesty International and the First Year Seminar program, which acts as an introduction to the rigors of college-level study.
The event expands on Wheaton's First Year Seminar program, which begins before freshmen arrive on campus with an assignment to read Simon Wiesenthal's "The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness." The book recounts how the author, a concentration camp prisoner, was asked for forgiveness by a dying Nazi SS officer, and then ponders whether forgiveness can be granted. The volume includes responses to Wiesenthal's story from religious, political and human rights leaders, including Rubenstein.
All freshmen are required to enroll in one of 26 First Year Seminar courses offered by the college. Each seminar is built around a controversy that reflects different ways of thinking and making sense of a topic. The program is designed to illustrate how new knowledge often results from the clash and synthesis of multiple and conflicting points of view, as well as develop other skills in reading and writing, research and critical thinking, debating and oral presentation.
Rubenstein, the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, is well-known for his efforts to gain the release of prisoners of conscience and oppose torture and capital punishment. He has been a guest on CBS Morning News, ABC's World News Tonight, CNN, National Public Radio and many other national media outlets. He has also contributed articles to The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other publications.
He is the author of three books: "Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg" (1996); "Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights" (1980) and "Adolf Hitler" (1982). He edited Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir "From Tarusa to Siberia" (1980), and is completing a U.S. edition of "An Unjust Trial: Stalin's Last Execution."
Rubenstein has taught at the Institute of Politics at Harvard and is a long-time Associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies. He has also lectured on the Soviet human rights movement at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow, organized the first national conference of Amnesty members in the Russian Federation and participated in a two-week Amnesty research mission to Uzbekistan.
Joining Rubenstein on the dais will be two members of One by One, a Brookline, Mass.-based non-profit organization created by Jews and Christians whose lives have been deeply affected by the Holocaust. Its members are the children of Holocaust survivors and of Germans who were perpetrators or bystanders in the Third Reich's "final solution." The group seeks to bear witness to the reality of the Holocaust, speak out against denial and historical revisionism and work for social justice.