Jewish Promise and Loss Subject of "Religion and Modernity" Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Lawrence Langer, professor emeritus at Simmons College and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, will speak at Holy Cross on Wednesday, April 12 at 7:30 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Hogan Campus Center.  Langer's lecture is entitled "The Chosen People and the People Chosen: Jewish Promise and Jewish Loss in the Paintings of Samuel Bak."  The lecture is free and open to the public.

The former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Research Institute of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Langer has also been a Koerner Research Fellow for the study of the Holocaust at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton in Oxford, England.

Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory earned Langer the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was named one of the 10 best books of 1991 by the editors of The New York Times.  He is also the author of The Game Continues: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak; Preempting the Holocaust; The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination; The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature; Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and Human Spirit; Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays; Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology; and Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak.

The Religion and Modernity Lecture Series is sponsored by the Dean's Office.