Victoria Barnett, director of the programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will present “Implications of the Holocaust for Multireligious Conversations” in a luncheon program at 11:45 a.m. Wednesday, April 22, at Mount Zion Temple, 1300 Summit Ave., St. Paul.
The program is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in collaboration with Mount Zion Temple, the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.
A registration fee of $12 includes a buffet lunch. People may register by April 16 through the Jay Phillips Center’s website or by calling (651) 962-5780.
Victoria Barnett
“As the event of the Holocaust recedes further into human history, popular and academic understandings of its implications have grown broader,” Barnett said. “As we become increasingly aware of the multireligious nature of our world, interfaith conversations focus on the commonalities and tensions between and among people of various religions, not just Judaism and Christianity.”
Explaining how recent scholarship about the Holocaust can inform these newer conversations, Barnett will focus on understanding the Holocaust in its historical particularities as well as in terms of more universal questions.
Barnett earned a doctorate in religion and conflict at George Mason University and is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press). She also is the editor and translator of Wolfgang Gerlach’s And the Witnesses Were Silent: the Confessing Church and the Jews (University of Nebraska Press) and the revised edition of Eberhard Bethge’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Fortress Press).
The author of numerous articles and book chapters on the role of religious leaders and institutions during the Holocaust, Barnett currently is working on a book about the role of international interfaith and ecumenical leaders during that period.
The Jay Phillips Center is a joint enterprise of the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University, Collegeville.
