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December 24, 2010
Institute nabs laureate
Elie Wiesel will act as CISA’s honorary chair.
RHONDA SPIVAK
The recently established Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism [CISA] in Winnipeg, established by Dr. Catherine Chatterley, already boasts such board members as David Matas, Deborah Schnitzer and Yude Henteleff. Adding to the excitement around the new institute is the fact that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel has just accepted Chatterley’s invitation to serve as the honorary chairperson.
In an interview, Chatterley said that she is extremely pleased that Wiesel will serve in that capacity.
“Prof. Wiesel is such a powerful symbol for so many of us – both Jews and non-Jews. He is a uniquely respected symbol of Jewish continuity and survival after the Shoah, a remnant of that incredibly diverse and creative world that was Jewish Europe, but also symbolic of our deep universal humanity – our connection to one another – and our hopeful resilience as a species,” she said.
CISA is committed to building a coalition of individuals, Jews and non-Jews, from a variety of political, ethnic and religious backgrounds, intent on educating the public about the history and nature of antisemitism in its classic and contemporary forms, Chatterley explained.
“Unfortunately, our post-Holocaust focus on racism and human rights has not produced an equivalent knowledge or concern about antisemitism. We must work to change this reality; antisemitism must be given equal weight and concern and must be placed on the international human rights agenda.”
Reiterating her pleasure that Wiesel accepted the post, Chatterley said, “I am very grateful that he has chosen to stand as the symbolic head of CISA [and] I am thankful to be able to consult with him as CISA charts its course for the future.
“Holocaust denial, obfuscation, other forms of minimization and outright erasure are growing worldwide,” she added. “CISA is dedicated to resisting these processes intellectually and to protecting and preserving the scholarly study of the Holocaust as a catastrophic and transformative event in Western history.”
Wiesel’s office at Boston University confirmed that Wiesel is acting as honorary chairman of CISA effective immediately. However, Wiesel was traveling and unavailable for further comment before press time.
Chatterley’s first book, Disenchantment: George Steiner and the Meaning of Western Culture after Auschwitz, is to be published this spring by Syracuse University Press as part of their Religion, Theology and the Holocaust series, edited by Steven Katz.
Chatterley, who was born and raised in Winnipeg, completed a BA in European history at the University of Manitoba, and teaches a course on antisemitism and the Holocaust at the University of Manitoba. Chatterley trained as a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Chicago in the fields of modern Jewish history, modern German and central European history, and spent two years in Montreal in a graduate program at Concordia University under the guidance of Prof. Frederick Krantz, who is the founding director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. There, she was also a member of the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies. Recently, she participated in Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, a conference held at Yale University this past summer, a gathering that was, to the best of her knowledge, “the largest academic gathering devoted to the issue ever.”
There are seven institutes for the study of antisemitism in the world today, said Chatterley: the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University (established in 1982), the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität Berlin (1990), the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University (1991), the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (2006), the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London (2009), the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University (2010) and the newly established Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in Winnipeg.
“There is also a new initiative to study antisemitism in school curricula and on university campuses, hosted by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research in San Francisco,” she said. “It is important to note that half of these organizations have been established in the last year or so – a chimera, indeed.”
Chatterley, along with the directors of these six other institutions, has been appointed as vice-president of the new International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA), based in New Haven, Conn.
“At our first board meeting of IASA in October 2010, I told my colleagues that, given adequate financial support from donors, CISA would like to host one of the upcoming annual international IASA conferences,” she said.
For more information, visit can-isa.com.
Rhonda Spivak is a freelance writer and editor of the Winnipeg Jewish Review.
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