A List
9/5/05

FORMER SLU PROF TO PRESENT SIEGEL LECTURE ON CAMPUS

CANTON - Former St. Lawrence University history professor Lawrence W. (Laurie) Baron will give the 2005 Rabbi Seymour Siegel Memorial Lecture, "Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: Recent Cinematic Trends" on Thursday, September 15, at 8 p.m. in Herring-Cole. The event is open to the public, free of charge.

Baron is director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies and the Nasatir Chair in modern Jewish history at San Diego State University; he was on the faculty at St. Lawrence from 1975 to 1988. His forthcoming book, to be published in November, is Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema. The publishers (Rowman & Littlefield) state, "Most Holocaust scholars and survivors contend that the event was so catastrophic and unprecedented that it defies authentic representation in feature films. Yet it is precisely the extremity of 'the Final Solution' and the issues it raised that have fueled the cinematic imagination since the end of World War II. Recognizing that movies reach a greater audience than eyewitness, historical, or literary accounts, Baron argues that they mirror changing public perceptions of the Holocaust over time and place. After tracing the evolution of the most commonly employed genres and themes in earlier Holocaust motion pictures, he focuses on how films from the l990s made the Holocaust relevant for contemporary audiences." Baron is also the author of The Eclectic Anarchism of Erich Muehsam; and co-editor of the anthologies Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological and Historical Perspectives on Altruism; and Martin Buber and the Human Sciences. He is also the founder and president of the Western Jewish Studies Association.

Rabbi Siegel was a noted Conservative Jewish author and scholar. His family donated his papers to St. Lawrence University's Owen D. Young Library and created an endowment for an annual lecture on campus in his memory.

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The Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies