LIVING
SCC to host Genocide Awareness Week one last time By Mala Blomquist
Keynote speaker KERRY KENNEDY
64 MARCH/APRIL 2021 | ARIZONA JEWISH LIFE
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pril is Genocide Prevention and Awareness Month, and Scottsdale Community College will once again present its Genocide Awareness Week conference. This event “seeks to address how we, as a global society, confront violent actions and current and ongoing threats of genocide throughout the world, while also looking to the past for guidance and to honor those affected by genocide.” This year, the event will be held virtually from April 12-17 and includes lectures, exhibits and storytelling by survivors, scholars, politicians, activists, artists, humanitarians and law enforcement members. As always, the event is free and open to the public. For the conference’s 10th anniversary, in 2022, the location will be moving to Arizona State University. With increasing attendance year after year, the conference has outgrown SCC. John Liffiton, who has been the conference director, will be accompanying the event to its new home. “I’m retiring from community college after 20 plus years. I am taking the conference to ASU, and I’m going to be a consultant at ASU for one year,” says John. “Then I will retire, and ASU will take it on from there.” In bringing the event to Tempe, John has been working with Lisa Kaplan and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson with ASU Jewish Studies, along with many other individuals and departments at the university. The conference is currently the largest one held in North America, and John believes that once it starts at ASU, it will become the biggest genocide awareness conference in the world. ASU is also working in partnership with the University of Arizona, the Martin-Springer Institute at Northern Arizona University and the Jewish History Museum and Holocaust History Center in Tucson. These partnerships will allow for a more comprehensive statewide conference and bring students and faculty from all the states’ universities to ASU. “We’re already working on 2022 now and have some speakers booked,” says John. “The keynote speaker will be Father Patrick Desbois.” Father Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, founded Yahad-In Unum (translation: together as one), a non-governmental organization based in Paris, to research and uncover genocidal practices worldwide. His first book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, documents the daunting task of identifying and examining all the sites where Nazi mobile units exterminated Jews in the Ukraine in WWII. His second book on this topic, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets, was released in 2018.
