Why Talk About the Holocaust?

This event is both In-Person and Online. Centre for Jewish Studies, Trinity College Dublin & Holocaust Awareness Ireland present Why Talk About the Holocaust? Beyond Auschwitz: 80 years of remembrance in Ireland . Fintan O’Toole in conversation with Oliver Sears. Moderated by Dr. Zuleika Rodgers.

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. He has won the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, the Orwell Prize for Journalism and the European Press Prize. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and of the American Philosophical Society and an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Until recently he was Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. 

His most recent book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A personal history of Ireland since 1958 was named as Book of the Year in Ireland and as one of the ten best books of 2022 by the New York Times. He is working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney.

Among his many other books are Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain, Judging Shaw, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America, Shakespeare is Hard but So is Life, and A Traitor’s Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.  

Oliver Sears is a London-born Dublin-based art dealer and gallery owner. He is the son of a Holocaust survivor and founder of Holocaust Awareness Ireland. His exhibition The Objects of Love which tells his family story through a collection of objects, documents & photographs that survived the war was recently on view at 92nd Street Y, New York and in Dublin Castle in partnership with the Office of Public Works.

Sears currently sits on the government appointed Legal Working Group of Restitution and Repatriation advisory committee. He is a member of PAKH, a German based organization focused on intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust promoting dialogue between the children and grandchildren of both survivors and perpetrators.

Dr. Zuleika Rodgers is Associate Professor in Jewish Studies at Trinity College Dublin. A graduate of TCD, she is the Director of the Centre for Jewish and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures. She has served as Head of Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies and as president of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies. She has been active in Holocaust awareness and education and was the Academic Director of the Certificate in Holocaust Education. She recently published a co-edited volume on Reimagining the Jews of Ireland: Historiography, Identity and Representation.