28 February 2008, 7.00 pm
Prof Porat is head of the Chaim Rosenberg School for Jewish Studies, head of the Stephen Roth Institute fot the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism and holds the Alfred P. Slaner Chair for the Study of Racism and Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University. She is also a member of the Yad Vashem Scientific Advisory Board and on the Board of the International Center for Holocaust Studies. Among her pubications are The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David. The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and The Holocaust, 1939-1945 (1990) (the Hebrew version won the Yad Ben-Zvi Award (1988) and the Kubowitzki Award (1990); Beyond the Corporeal: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner ((2000), which received the Zandam and Buchman Awards. Prof Porat has also jointly edited Anti-Semitism Worldwide since 1994 and she also edited the original Hebrew version of Avraham Tory's Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (1990).
Professor Porat's lecture is part of a series of lectures in the coming year at the Wiener Library, together with Kingston University, examining some of the ways in which the establishment and recognition of certain principals in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War evolved, and how these are viewed in society today. For example, the creation of the State of Israel, the founding of the European Union, the drawing up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Genocide Convention were directly shaped by the Second World War and the Holocaust. The series attempts to ask in which ways certain moral value systems, held since the end of the War, are increasingly being attacked, ignored and eroded.