Fifty years ago, Nazi Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for war crimes. The 1961 trial electrified the world community and unleashed the modern-era interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust Survivors.
On September 8 at 7 p.m. at Temple Emanu-El, the Dallas Holocaust Museum will present a special lecture and presentation by Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, author of the new book The Eichmann Trial (Schocken/Nextbook, 2011). Dr. Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and is author of several internationally-acclaimed books related to the Holocaust.
Tickets for this event range from $40 to $75 and may be purchased now by calling the Museum at 214-741-7500. A special students-only price of $15 is also available. Event sponsorships are also available by calling Development Director Maria MacMullin at 214-741-7500. Tickets are expected to sell out for this event, so early purchase is recommended.
Publisher’s Weekly has called Dr. Lipstadt’s book, “a penetrating and authoritative dissection of a landmark case and its after effects.” David Gergen of CNN and the Kennedy School at Harvard has described it as “a powerfully written testimony to our ongoing fascination with the proceedings, the resonance of survivor tales, and how both changed our understanding of justice after atrocity.”
As part of the presentation, the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance will also exhibit for the first time in many years the original courtroom drawings of Eichmann by Edward Eichel. Eichel was commissioned by the Jewish literary magazine L’Arche in Paris to pen the drawings during the Eichmann trial. The Eichel drawings, later published in Haim Gouri’s The Glass Cage: The Jerusalem Trial (1962), have been on loan to the Dallas Holocaust Museum by the artist since 1994.
The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court astonished the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before.
In her presentation on the Eichmann trial, Dr. Lipstadt will provide an overview of the trial and analyze the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced.
As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Dr. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas is a community sponsor for the event.
Temple Emanu-El is located at 8500 Hillcrest Avenue
Dallas, TX 75225-4288
Purchase tickets by calling 214-741-7500.
Ticket information:
$75 Includes VIP Reception, presentation by Dr. Lipstadt, and 12-month membership to the DHM/CET
$65* Includes VIP Reception and presentation by Dr. Lipstadt
*Member Rate: $50 for Members of DHM/CET and Temple Emanu-El
$40** Includes presentation by Dr. Lipstadt
**Member Rate: $30 for Members of DHM/CET and Temple Emanu-El
$15 Student rate for presentation by Dr. Lipstadt
Generously sponsored by:
Heard Robins Cloud & Black LLP
David Greenstone, Esq.
Peter A. Kraus, Esq.
Jeffrey B. Simon, Esq.
David Genender, Esq.
Dr. Renee Stanley
