History, Family and Judaism

Oct. 30, 2008 -- Award-winning writer and critic, Daniel Mendelsohn, will give this year's annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture. His talk, "Finding 'The Lost': A Journey into the History, Family and Judaism," will focus on his quest to unearth the stories of his family members who perished during World War II. In his 2006 best-selling memoir, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" Mendelsohn tells the story of his grandfather's brother, who stayed behind in Ukraine and was killed in the Holocaust after his siblings had emigrated to America.

Mendelsohn's other works include "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity," "Gender and The City in Euripide's Political Plays" and a collection of essays on literature and the arts, "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily it Can Be Broken," which was published recently.

After earning his bachelor's in classics at the University of Virginia and his master's and doctorate from Princeton, where he was a Mellon Fellow in Humanities and lecturer, Mendelsohn began a career in journalism in 1994. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He served from 2000-2002 as the weekly book critic for New York magazine and won the 2001 National Book Critics Award for Excellence in Reviewing. Currently, he is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

The Assembly series is co-sponsoring this talk held at 4 p.m., Wednesday, November 12 in Graham Chapel. All Assembly Series talks are free, open to the public and require no advance reservations.