Ithaca College will launch the inaugural Peggy R. Williams Difficult Dialogues Symposium on Wednesday, Oct. 7, with a presentation by Marc Ellis (photo at right), director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University. Serving as a respondent will be Sanford Gutman, professor emeritus of history at SUNY Cortland. The symposium, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 8 p.m. in Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall.
Named in honor of Ithaca College’s seventh president, the Peggy R. Williams Difficult Dialogues Symposium is supported by an endowed fund created by the Ithaca College Board of Trustees upon her retirement in 2008. Williams has been an advocate for dialogue about complex and controversial issues of the time and a staunch defender of academic freedom and active, open inquiry. The symposium takes its name — with permission — from an initiative originally launched by the Ford Foundation that was designed to promote academic freedom and religious, cultural and political pluralism on college and university campuses.
“I am honored that through an event established in my name, the campus community will have the opportunity to continue the work of fulfilling one of the highest goals of an institution of higher education: to be a place that lives the principles of free inquiry and thoughtful discussion, characterized by mutual respect, tolerance and an informed exchange of ideas and beliefs,” says Williams.
Influenced by the Jewish ethical tradition and the dissonance of Jewish life after the Holocaust, Marc Ellis has written and spoken extensively about the complexity of modern Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations and how they are intertwined with the politics of the United States and Israel. His books include “Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life,” “Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time” and, most recently, “Judaism Does Not Equal Israel.”
Ellis was the founding director of the Institute for Justice and Peace at Maryknoll School of Theology and served as a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions before joining Baylor in 1998 as University Professor of Jewish Studies, professor of history and director of the Center for Jewish Studies. Among other honors, he has been inducted into the Martin Luther King Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. He serves on the national advisory board of the Middle East Council, board of directors of the Society of Jewish Ethics and editorial board of “Tikkun Magazine.”
Currently a visiting professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell University, Sanford Gutman spent 37 years on the faculty of SUNY Cortland. His scholarship focuses on the French Revolution and the history of Jews in France, and his deep interest in the interlocking subjects of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict has led to many publications and public speaking engagements.
Gutman has chaired both the history department and Jewish studies program committee at Cortland, and since 1975 he has served as the college’s Jewish chaplain. In the fall of 2007 he taught a course on the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict as a visiting professor at Ithaca College. A past president of the New York State Association of European Historians, he has taken part in programs on the teaching of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism at Yad Vashem and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
