Next Wednesday I'll be starting a ten-day stint as a faculty member for a fellowship program that allows law students to study professional identity and ethics by examining the roles lawyers and judges played in the Holocaust. The program, called FASPE, is run under the auspices of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. My contribution will be to offer a comparative look at the roles played by lawyers and judges in the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States.
If I'm feeling up to it, I hope to blog about the experience here. I say "if I'm feeling up to it" because I'm expecting it to be emotionally exhausting. We start with two days in New York (cheerfully at a hotel that looks out on Ground Zero), then have two days in Berlin, several days at Auschwitz, and a couple of days in Krakow. I've been looking forward to the trip for months, but in these final days my anticipation is mixing with a sense of faint dread. That's a whole lot of sadness and trauma packed into ten days.
But already the trip is paying a black-humor dividend! I went online today to check out the hotel where our group will be staying in Oswiecem, Poland, and found this:
The words at the top made me laugh very hard. I am still laughing. I worry that this makes me a bad person.
Oy veh, talk about bad marketing!
But the trip & program sound wonderful. I do hope you'll feel up to blogging about it.
Posted by: Eric Fink | May 19, 2011 at 11:52 PM
Could have been worse, could have said "Arbeit Macht Frei"!
Posted by: Brian | May 20, 2011 at 08:31 AM
OMG, I don't know whether to laugh or cry! But I hope the trip is worthwhile.
Posted by: Vickie | May 20, 2011 at 01:05 PM
Eric,
Maybe you can bring them a copy of the Holocaust cookbook you blogged about earlier? Seriously, it sounds like it will be a great experience for you and it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it!
Posted by: Len Rotman | May 20, 2011 at 05:25 PM