This image-rich talk will tell the story of Varian Fry, a Christian journalist whose time in Berlin after the Nazis assumed power transformed him into an anti-Nazi crusader who ended up developing a network in the south of France through which he rescued between 2,000 and 4,000 potential victims of the Nazis. With support from individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Fry managed to get artists and writers, musicians and intellectuals to safety. The list of those–many although not all of them Jewish– who arguably owed their lives to him, included luminaries like Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lipschitz, Bohuslav Martinu, and a host of others. Fry’s story, like that of Oskar Schindler, is above all that of an undistinguished everyday individual whom circumstances–and his own courage and profound moral sense–transform into a light-filled hero in one of the darkest periods in human history.
Ori Z. Soltes teaches theology, art history, philosophy and political history at Georgetown University. He is former Director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum. As co-founding Director of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project he has spent 25 years focused on the issue of Nazi-plundered art. Soltes has curated over 90 exhibitions, domestically and internationally, and has authored or edited some 30 books and scores of articles and exhibition catalogue essays. Recent art-related volumes include Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust; Tradition and Transformation: Three Millennia of Jewish art and Architecture; God and the Goalposts: A Brief History of Sports, Religion, Politics, War, and Art; Growing Up Jewish in India: Synagogues, Customs, and Celebrations: From the Bene Israel to the Art of Siona Benjamin; and Between Pasts and Future: A Conceptual History of Israeli Art.
Register before 5 pm. the Sunday before for in-person lunch ($10) or by the next evening for the Zoom link.
For more information, please email Lunch and Learn.