Events recollecting the Holocaust to take place at Fairfield University | Press Releases

Image: B Zelizer Fairfield University's Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies will mark the upcoming Holocaust Remembrance Day with two events - a lecture and the annual Holocaust Remembrance Service, always one of the most moving events on campus.

The public is welcome to both events, which are free.

Scholar and author Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D., will deliver a lecture entitled, "Remembering to Forget: Images of the Holocaust," on Thursday, April 24, 2014 at 7 p.m. It will take place in the Dolan School of Business, and is co-sponsored by the university's Department of Communication. Dr. Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication.

"This presentation addresses the shape of Holocaust representation in the news," said Dr. Zelizer. "It tracks both what we saw at the time of the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 and what lingers from those pictures in the contemporary depiction of other atrocities. In so doing, it raises critical questions about journalism's depiction of mass killing in the contemporary moment."

A former journalist, Professor Zelizer is co-editor and founder of the journal Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism (Sage). Her essays on the media have appeared in The Nation, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Newsday, The Huffington Post and other publications. She is the author of the award-winning book, "About to Die: How News Images Move the Public" (Oxford 2010).

The annual Holocaust Remembrance Service will be held on Monday, April 28, at 4:30 p.m., in the Egan Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola, on the Fairfield campus. Speaking at the service will be Dr. Ilse Leeser, who will share her heart-wrenching history in a talk entitled, "Life as a Child in Hiding: Grace and Struggle."

When Dr. Leeser was a teenager, a Dutch family in Holland took her into hiding with her sister from 1943 to 1945 to escape the Nazis. Her parents and her grandmother were killed in a concentration camp in Sobibor, Poland, in 1943. Ilse immigrated to the United States with her sister and her niece in 1947. She later married and had children. She also went on to become a nurse practitioner and continued her schooling until she received a Ph.D. in nursing in 1988 at the age of 60. She taught at Pace University in New York for almost 20 years, Simmons College, and the MGH nursing program in Boston.

The service is vital to help students understand the scope of this tragic era, while serving as a reminder of the millions of individuals who were murdered at the hands of the Nazis. Six candles will be lit in memory of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust. The service is co-sponsored with Campus Ministry and KADIMA, Fairfield's undergraduate Jewish student organization.

For more information about the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, visit their website or call (203) 254-4000, ext. 2066.