Speaker Levy to address evolution of anti-Semitism

Richard S. Levy, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an internationally recognized expert on anti-Semitism, will present the talk "Anti-Semitism: New or Used?" at 7:30 p.m. March 23 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St., Hewit Place. The talk is free and open to the public.

Levy will address whether current anti-Semitism, seen in riots in European cities, Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish stereotyping, and in some current media, is recycled hatred or a new and ominous trend.

He will place current anti-Semitism in a historical context, attempting to disentangle the new from the old forms of anti-Semitism and to understand their disturbing power to move people to self-destructive, self-deluded action. He will also speak to the prospects for successfully combating what has been called "the longest hatred."

Richard S. Levy has taught German history at the University of Massachusetts and since 1971 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of "The Downfall of the Anti-semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany"; editor of "Antisemitism in the Modern World"; and editor, translator and annotator of author Binjamin Segel's, "A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Most recently, Levy edited the monumental two-volume work, "Antisemitism: Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution."

Levy's talk is the Annual Henry and Gretl Wald Lecture, sponsored by the Henry and Gretl Wald Lecture Endowment and the Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies at UNL.

CONTACT: Cheryl Kruid, Project Assistant, Harris Center for Judaic Studies, (4020 472-9561