"Global Perspectives on the Holocaust"

The annual Holocaust Studies Symposium is back on our campus next week, Oct. 19-22. Here's this year's program... and here was my notice of the excellent conference two years ago.

Organized in 1988, the Middle Tennessee State University Holocaust Studies Committee's original mission was to encourage the study of the Holocaust at Middle Tennessee State University and in the mid-South.  Since that time the committee's mission evolved to:

• disseminate greater understanding of and knowledge about the Holocaust from an inter-disciplinary and bi-gender perspective;

• serve as a bulwark against the spread of Holocaust denial and antisemitism, as well against racial, religious and ethnic hatred;

• memorialize the lives and suffering of all people persecuted during the Holocaust.  These include but are not limited to Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Hitler’s political opponents, people of African descent, Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups, and persons with physical or mental disabilities

• raise awareness in both the academic community and the general public that genocidal hate did not end in 1945 by disseminating information about other genocides, past and present.