Join us for a preview of local photographer, Sylvia Horwitz’s photo-exhibition: “Desaparecidos: Mothers of the Disappeared. Sylvia will be showing her photos and a brief film on the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. There will also be time for questions and answers. Sylvia’s work will be on display at the Sabes Jewish Community Center, located at 4330 S. Cedar Lake Road, Minneapolis. The exhibit will run from March 12 to April 23, 2009, with a reception on March 15 that is free and open to the public. Horwitz’s work was funded in part by Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council and the Howard B Brin Jewish Arts Endowment Fund. The exhibit is a photographic tribute to the Desaparecidos, those who “disappeared” during the military regime of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983). Under this dictatorship, an estimated 30,000 student activists, young professionals, writers and artists were tortured and killed as political prisoners; a disproportionate number were Jewish. The work of Minnesota-based photographer Sylvia Horwitz chronicles the stories of Jewish women within an organized group of mothers and grandmothers still actively protesting after 30 years. They march weekly on the Plaza de Mayo for memory, truth and justice. The purpose of this exhibit is to bring awareness and greater solidarity between our communities and here in Argentina.

As the U.S enters a new political era, what can we learn from one nation’s battle to define its own way forward in a globalizing world? With co-editors, Jim Schultz and Melissa Crane Draper of the Democracy Center, Cochabamba, Bolivia “This is the little-known story of a people that has dared to fight back against the most powerful economic forces on the planet, told by writers with the courage to dig relentlessly for the truth and the humility to stand back and let their subjects speak for themselves. Enraging, unsparing, inspiring.”
Q&A, Slideshow, Refreshements

Lisa Hilbink is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, and prior to joining the faculty at Minnesota, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Professor Hilbink specializes in comparative judicial politics, with a focus on Latin America and Iberia. Her work seeks to understand the conditions under which judges will be willing and able to take stands in defense of rights and rule of law principles. Professor Hilbink has been a student of the Chilean judiciary since the mid-1990s, when she was a Fulbright scholar in Chile. Her book on the subject, /Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile/ (Cambridge University Press, 2007) won the Herbert Jacob best book award from the Law and Society Association. Professor Hilbink will offer this talk following a two-week visit to Chile, where she will participate in an international conference on the national and international legacy of the Pinochet detention in London ten years ago. The presentation will focus on changes and continuities in judicial responses to human rights claims in Chile since 1998, and Professor Hilbink will field audience questions regarding the subjects treated in the POV documentary, “The Judge and the General.”