A Muslim academic from New York City will help St. Cloud State mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a presentation called “The Shoah through Muslim Eyes.”
Mehnaz Afridi presents 6 p.m. Feb. 1 in Stewart Hall’s Ritsche Auditorium. A question-and-answer session will follow her remarks.
The presentation is free and public. Parking is $1.50 an hour in the 4th Avenue Parking Ramp.
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A professor at Manhattan College, Afridi is director of that school’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center.
She is the author of the forthcoming book “Shoah through Muslim Eyes.” Published by Academic Studies Press, Boston, the book is expected to hit shelves in February.
According to the publisher, the book rejects polemical myths about the Holocaust and Jews and instead offers a new way of creating understanding among the communities, through the acceptance and enormity of the Shoah.
Afridi holds a doctorate in religious studies from University of South Africa and a master’s degree in religious studies from Syracuse University. Among the classes she teaches are Religion and Holocaust, Religion and Genocide and Muslims in America.
Pakistan-born Afridi has been abused by some Jews and Muslims because of her leadership role at the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center. New York blogger Pamela Geller suggested Afridi’s appointment was stupid and indecent, saying “Six million dead Jews are weeping and screaming from their graves.”
Afridi’s talk is a Scott and Lynn Bryce Lecture on Holocaust Education, a speaker series inspired by the former St. Cloud State educators and donors. Learn about the Bryces.
External sponsors of the talk are Minnesota State, the Jewish Community Relations Council: Minnesota and the Dakotas, and #UniteCloud. St. Cloud State sponsors are the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education, Department of History and the Religious Studies Program.
By United Nations resolution, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked each year on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp in what is today Poland.
The 1941-45 genocide in German-occupied Europe resulted in the systematic deaths of about six millions Jews and another five million Romanis, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners-of-war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, disabled people and others targeted by the Nazi-controlled German government.
The Holocaust is also known as “the Shoah,” from the Hebrew word for “the catastrophe” or “the calamity.”
For more information, contact Daniel Wildeson, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education at [email protected] and 320-308-4201.
