The 2026 Annual Samuel and Dorothy Frankel Memorial Lecture

Thursday, April 16, 2026, 8:00 PM
Frank Center for Public Affairs, Room 100, 238 Church Street, Middletown, CT

The Fate of the Word and the Fate of the Jews
Speaker: Sir Simon Schama

Did the enormity of the Holocaust make it, literally, indescribable, except as an inventory of the numbers murdered or the euphemisms of the murderers? Is the distance between Anne Frank and the physical reality of the horror, the condition of her diary's becoming the most widely read document of the Holocaust? The lecture returns to what was said and written by witnesses - poets, diarists; letter-writers from the ghettos and camps; and their struggles to find words adequate to their experience.

Sir Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University and Contributing Editor of the Financial Times. He has previously taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard Universities. He is an award-winning author of 20 books, translated into 23 languages, including Story of the Jews Vol I and II. His most recent title, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations was published in 2023. Writer-presenter of sixty documentaries on art, history and literature for BBC television, Sir Simon’s latest documentary The Road to Auschwitz aired on the PBS in 2025.