2019 Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture

International bestselling author, award-winning critic and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn will present Latkes with the Priests in Lwów: Jews and Christians, Harmony and Horror in Prewar Poland. Delving into a rich store of family anecdote and legend, Mendelsohn will explore how relative harmony between diverse cultures and religions can devolve into tales of horror – and, sometimes, of heroism.

Delving into a rich store of family anecdote and legend, Mendelsohn will explore how relative harmony between diverse cultures and religions can devolve into tales of horror – and, sometimes, of heroism.

In addition to serving as editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books and the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, Mendelsohn teaches classics and literature at Bard College. He is the author of eight books, including The Elusive Embrace (a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year); An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus); and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, about Mendelsohn’s quest for infor­mation about six relatives who perished in the Holocaust.

A New York Times and international bestseller, The Lost won the National Books Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award and the Salon Book Award in the United States, as well as the Prix Médicis in France and many other honors in the United States and abroad. With more than half a million copies in print, it has been published in over 15 languages.

Free and open to the region’s academic and religious communities and the general public, the lecture will be followed by a book signing with Mendelsohn and kosher reception featuring desserts and beverages. Registration is required.

The Jerome S. Cardin Memorial Lecture was established in 1986 by the Jerome S. Cardin family to foster exploration of topics in the humanities pertinent to the Jewish and Christian traditions, particularly in the area of Jewish-Christian relations. Notable speakers have included Chaim Potok, His Eminence William Cardinal Keeler, Cornel West, Taylor Branch, Adam Gopnik, Stephen Greenblatt, Susannah Heschel and Robert Alter.