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Rabbi Marvin Hier to Speak at Harvard Law School
Wednesday, April 25, 2001, 6:00pm
Vorenberg Classroom (Langdell North)
free and open to the public
Rabbi Marvin Hier is the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its acclaimed Museum of Tolerance. Under his leadership, the Center has become one of the foremost Jewish human rights agencies in the world, with a constituency of more than 400,000 families. The Center maintains offices throughout the United States, and in Canada, Europe, Israel and Argentina.
Rabbi Hier meets regularly with world leaders to discuss the Center's agenda - a wide range of issues including worldwide anti-Semitism, the resurgence of neo-Nazism and international terrorism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, his dialogue with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl led to a critical debate on German reunification and the need for 'deutsche memory'.
Rabbi Hier is the founder of Moriah, the Center's film division, and has received two Academy Awards for his work. He won his first Academy Award in 1981 as co-producer and co-writer for Genocide, a documentary on the Holocaust. He won another in 1997 as co-producer of The Long Way Home, which offers new insights into the critical post WWII period between 1945 and 1948 and the plights of tens of thousands of refugees who survived the Holocaust. He also wrote and co-produced the award-winning Echoes That Remain, a documentary on pre-World War II European Jewish life and produced and co-wrote Liberation, the first production of Moriah Films. Under Rabbi Hier's direction, the Wiesenthal Center has served as consultant to Steven Spielberg's epic Schindler's List and ABC Television's miniseries adaptation of Herman Wonk's novel, War and Remembrance.
Rabbi Hier is the recipient of an honorary degree and many awards. In 1993 French President Francois Mitterand made him a Chevalier in the Ordre National du Merite.