I hate press releases. I almost never read them and I am very reluctant to reward them by posting them in the Corner. One day I'm going to write an essay on my — I wholeheartedly admit — irrational and even demented hatred of press releases (I am not kidding. I sometimes personally hold it against people who send me press releases, which I know is crazy). But sometimes you have to make an exception. A reader forwarded this to me and I find it beyond fascinating:
You are cordially invited to attend United Poultry Concerns’ 7th Annual Conference
on the topic of Inadmissible Comparisons
Co-hosted by the NYU Student Animal Legal Defense Fund and Lantern Books at the NYU Law School in New York City, March 24-25, 2007
Inadmissible Comparisons asks: Can the Holocaust be compared with African American slavery or the Native American genocide? Can any of these experiences be related to those of animals on today’s factory farms? Recently, a number of writers and thinkers have sought to draw parallels between the suffering of one group of individuals and another, and incurred the wrath of those who consider their experience unique. This conference explores why such comparisons are offered and asks whether they should or should not be made. It examines the rhetoric and images of those comparisons and the agendas that might lie behind them, while interrogating the need for comparative thinking in the first place.
Conference Address:
Vanderbilt Hall
40 Washington Square South, between MacDougal & Sullivan Streets
Room 210
New York, NY 10012
Vanderbilt Hall is one block east of the West Fourth Street subway station.
Registration: $75. Students/Seniors: $60. NYU students/faculty: free. Please bring your photo ID
Non-profit Exhibit Table: $60. For-profit Exhibit Table $90
To register, send check or money order to UPC, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405. Or register by credit card by clicking here
NYU Students and Faculty Click Here To Register
Maximum attendance capacity: 148. Register by March 15. $100 after March 15.
Confirmed speakers:
Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, author of The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities and More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern Books)
Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat (Continuum) and editor with Josephine Donovan of The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (forthcoming March 2007 Columbia University Press)
Ashanti Alston, anarchist activist, speaker, writer and former member of the Black Panther Party, contributor to the anthology Igniting the Revolution: Voices in Defense of Mother Earth (AK Press), and speaker at the Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Conference at Syracuse University.
Roberta Kalechofsky, fiction writer, publisher, and animal rights activist, founder of Jews for Animal Rights, author of Animal Suffering and The Holocaust: The Problem With Comparisons (Micah Publications)
Pattrice Jones, coordinator of the Eastern Shore Chicken Sanctuary and the Global Hunger Alliance, author of Aftershock: Confronting Trauma in a Violent World: A Guide for Activists and their Allies (Lantern Books)
Charles Patterson, author of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (Lantern Books)
