Medical Ethics and the Shoah*
The Holocaust Museum Houston is sponsoring a special exhibit from September 7, 2007 -- February 3, 2008 entitled "Medical Ethics and the Holocaust." The exhibit features a 15-part free public lecture series, an exhibition at the Mincberg Gallery, and an evening panel of three Nobel laureates discussing modern medical ethics in light of the Shoah.*
This looks to be an incredibly fascinating and meaningful exhibit, and I am doubly thrilled seeing as how I live very close to the Museum. If I may be permitted a moment of municipal pride, Houston has a thriving arts scene, and more than its share of nationally recognized museums.
In another reminder of the humanists' ethos on using erudition in the moment-to-moment practice of living virtuously, this exhibit speaks quite personally to me, as I have spent much time and effort in studying Jewish history in general and the Shoah* in particular. My grandfather escaped Lithuania in 1935, on one of the last boats that left England for South Africa, and the shtetl where he was born and raised does not exist anymore.
The geneology tools available through Yad Vashem's web site are quite powerful, and nothing but dabbling produced several names who are almost sure to be relatives of mine and who were murdered during the Shoah*. Once again, my academic and my personal worlds collide, though they were never really separate to begin with.
In any case, if you're anywhere near the Houston area, the exhibit looks to be worth viewing, to say the least.
(h/t Howard Brody)
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*For personal reasons that I'd be happy to go into privately (i.e., over email), I prefer to use the term "Shoah" instead of "Holocaust" whenever possible.
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