Posted on Apr 27, 2006

Union College's Kenney Community Center is hosting the 10th annual U-Care Day, a carnival for Schenectady youth on Sunday, May 7, from noon to 3 p.m. in the Memorial Fieldhouse. The event is free and open to children 12 and under (adults should accompany all children).

Union Community Action Reaching Everyone (UCARE) provides undergraduates with volunteer opportunities in the community. Students can also get information on additional community organizations that provide volunteer services.

The nonprofit event is a way for Union students to celebrate the success of their community outreach with local families who take advantage of the volunteer services the college offers.

“The most important thing about this carnival is the fact that Union College students care about building a strong relationship with the local community,” said Karolina Cikowska '07, UCARE coordinator with classmate LaToya Roper. “All of the students involved love interacting with the kids on this day.”

Approximately 40-60 students volunteer for the day. The College expects at least 100 kids from the city to attend.

Each activity is run by a group or association from the College. Fraternities Alpha Delta, Theta Delta Chi, Delta Kappa Epsilon and Sigma Phi will host the Bouncy Bounce, a football tire toss, barbeque and basketball clinic. Sorority Gamma Phi Beta will work with participants on gardening techniques.

In addition, the National Society of Black Engineers will lead a workshop on making masks, Big Brothers Big Sisters joins the Men's Soccer team to host a soccer clinic, and the Women's Volleyball team will run the cotton candy machine.

U-Care day is sponsored by Price Chopper, Stewart's Shops and Union College President James Underwood.

For more information, call 388-6777 or email ucare@union.edu.

Posted on Apr 26, 2006

Thursday, April 27, 4:30 p.m. / Phi Beta Kappa room / Philosophy speaker series: Georges Rey, University of Maryland, on “The Importance of Representing Nothing: Perceptual Inexistents and Cognitive Science”

Thursday, April 27, 6 p.m. / Old Chapel / Department of Music, East Asian Studies Program present Asian percussion concert, “Celebration of Spring”

Thursday, April 27, 6-10 p.m. / Sorum House / Italian dinner, “The Way Mother Used to Make It” (RSVP required)

Thursday, April 27, 7 p.m. / Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / Holocaust Remembrance Day speaker: Eugene Pogany, author, “In My Brother's Image:Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust”

Friday, April 28, 1 p.m. / Everest Lounge / Discussion with William Kelleher, associate professor of Cultural Anthropology, Syracuse University, on Northern Ireland (RSVP); part of Anthropology 229 (“Ruminations on Violence”), sponsored by Scholars Program and History Department

Friday, April 28, 7:30 p.m. / Memorial Chapel / Organ concert with Christopher Marks, organist, Syracuse UniversityFriday, April 28-Monday, May 1, 8 & 10 p.m. Reamer Campus Center Auditorium / Movie: “Annapolis”

Saturday, April 29, 9 p.m. / Old Chapel / Real World marathon, 1st season

Sunday, April 30, 5 p.m. / Old Chapel / Catholic Student Association Mass and dinner

Monday, May 1 / Burns Arts Atrium Gallery / Steinmetz Arts Exhibition

Tuesday, May 2, 12:35 p.m. / Arts 215 / Laurie Tyler, assistant professor of Chemistry, on “Using Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry to Help Elucidate the Role of Metal in Biology”

Tuesday, May 2, 4 p.m. / Central Park ball field / Baseball vs. Hamilton

Tuesday, May 2, 4 p.m. / Frank Bailey Field / Women's lacrosse vs. Oneonta

Tuesday, May 2, 6 p.m. / Arts 215 / Feminist film series: “Me and You and Everyone We Know”

Tuesday, May 2, 7-9 p.m. / Christie's @ Sorum House / Concert: Composer-performer Tom Ross with Steve Gorn, Indian bamboo flute, and Dean Mirabito, tabla hand-drums

Wednesday, May 3, 4 p.m. / Wold House / International Festival

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Wednesday, May 3, 4:30 p.m. / Old Chapel / International Festival<FONT getting started becker career center

Wednesday, May 3, 5 p.m. / Blue House / Crosstalks: “Immigration…Whose Country Is It?”

Thursday, May 4, noon / Steinmetz 209 / Computer science seminar: Have You Thought About Grad School?

Thursday, May 4, 1 p.m. / Becker Career Center 212 / Interviewing workshop

Friday, May 5, 4 p.m. / Golub House / Cinco de Mayo Fiesta

Friday, May 5-Sunday, May 7 / Union Campus / Steinmetz Symposium and Spring Family Weekend

Friday, May 5-Monday, May 8, 8 & 10 p.m. / Reamer Campus Auditorium / Movie: “Eight Below”

Friday, May 5, 8 p.m. / Memorial Chapel / Steinmetz Concert: Union College and Community Orchestra, and Union College Choir, Victor Klimash, director of performance studies, conductor

Saturday, May 6 / Prize Day

Saturday, May 6 / Reamer Patio / Union performance groups showcase

Saturday, May 6, 12:30 p.m. / Memorial Chapel / Steinmetz Concert: Union College Jazz Ensemble

Saturday, May 6, 1 p.m. Central Park ball field / Baseball vs. Skidmore (2)

Saturday, May 6, 5:30 p.m. / Old Chapel / Phi Beta Kappa Induction

Sunday, May 7 / Field House / U-Care Day, kids' carnival

Sunday, May 7, noon / Old Chapel / Magic: The Gathering Tournament

Posted on Apr 26, 2006

Enron. Barry Bonds and steroids. Illegal downloading of music.

Each day, the headlines are filled with topics that raise serious ethical concerns. Michael S. Rapaport, ’59, believes one reason is because colleges don’t do enough to educate its students about ethics. He also thinks the students who most need ethics courses are those who avoid any class with “ethics” in the title.

Beginning next academic year, ethics will become a staple of classroom discussion across the board. The “Michael S. Rapaport Everyday Ethics Across the Curriculum Initiative,’’ will provide grants to faculty who integrate ethics segments into their regular courses.

The idea grew out of a pilot project begun in 2003-04 by Economics Professor Harold Fried, who introduced ethics into the economic curriculum using a gift from Rapaport, a longtime college benefactor.

Inspired by the success of that initiative, Rapaport provided an additional gift to broaden the idea and teach ethics across the curriculum.

Once the program is officially launched, Union will join a select few colleges in the country that offer a broad-based ethics module in its curriculum. One of the best programs exists at Dartmouth College’s Ethics Institute. Its executive director, Aine Donovan, will meet with Union faculty who are interested in introducing ethics into their courses today (April 27) from noon to 2 p.m. in Everest Lounge.

Union’s program will be led by Philosophy Professor Robert Baker, who also chairs the Alden March Bioethics Institute at the Graduate College of Union University; and Anastasia Pease, the program director for the new ethics initiative.

Among the possible ethics discussions which could find their way into classrooms are segments on scholarly or professional integrity; whistle-blowing and cheating; and a segment on intellectual property, or “stealing ideas and innovations.’’

“The initiative could transform students’ Union College experience, sensitizing them to the ethical dimensions of everyday life, equipping them to cope with ethical dilemmas and to assert moral leadership at work and in the community,’’ Baker said.

Posted on Apr 25, 2006

Eugene Pogany's widely acclaimed memoir about his Jewish father and Catholic priest uncle – identical Hungarian twins torn apart by the Holocaust – has been called “superlative,” “haunting” “poignant,” “powerful” and “elegant.”

Pogany, the author of “In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust,” (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000) will speak at Union on Thursday, April 27 at 7 p.m. in Reamer Campus Center Auditorium as the highlight of this year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah, observance.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Pogany is a practicing clinical psychologist in Boston and a frequent lecturer on anti-Semitism and Jewish-Catholic relations.

“In My Brother's Image” chronicles the extraordinary story of identical twin brothers Miklós and György Pogany, who were born in Budapest in 1913 of Jewish parents but raised as devout Catholic converts, largely so their father could succeed at work as a Christian. World War II plunged their family into grief and conflict that lasted for generations.

Miklós Pogony, Eugene's father, was persecuted by the Nazis as a Jew and sent to Bergen-Belsen. He later renounced Christianity and returned to Judaism.

Uncle György became a Catholic priest and spent the war years in rural Italy as a devoted follower of the revered Padre Pio, sheltered from the Holocaust and his family's fate. 

The author, raised in the Jewish faith, was five when he met his uncle in America after the  brothers' 19-year separation. In the 37 years between his reunion with his brother Miklós and his own death, Father Pogany never asked about his brother's experiences during the Holocaust. 

The twins' mother, a devout Catholic who never denied her Jewish roots, died clutching a crucifix while walking into the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Eugene Pogany collected much of the early family background from his uncle, who served as pastor to a New Jersey parish of Hungarian refugees. And while his father divulged little about his past, the author's mother, Margit, spoke of the atrocities of her struggle for survival as a Jew. 

After his uncle's death in 1993, Pogany traveled with his father to Hungary and made several trips to Italy to research his family's history.  

Posted on Apr 25, 2006

Best-selling author and award-winning journalist Anita Diamant will speak on “Imagining the Past: How (and Why) I Write Historical Fiction”  tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Union College's Nott Memorial.

The talk, part of Union's Perspectives at the Nott lecture series, is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by Blue House, the English Department and the President's Office. A reception will follow the lecture.

Professor Harry Marten, chair of the English Department at Union, once taught Diamant as an undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis.

“She's a fine, fine writer, one of my first great students, and we have been able to keep in touch over the years,” said Marten. “It's a great feeling to have someone who once sat in your English class become a best-selling novelist”

A column Diamant wrote in the Boston Globe in 1990 reveals to her readers that her passion for writing owes much to Marten's teaching. The last paragraph reads, “Besides, I was lucky. I had found Harry Marten, who taught me about Dickens and writing and how to tie my shoes.”

Her first work of fiction, “The Red Tent,” won the 2001 Booksense Book of the Year Award. Based on the biblical story of Dinah, “The Red Tent” became a word-of-mouth bestseller in the United States and overseas, where it has been published in 25 countries.

“The Last Days of Dogtown,” her most recent novel, is set in a small New England village in the early 1800s and tells the stories of a group of marginal, mostly invisible American characters, including free Africans, spinsters and widows.

Diamant began her career as a freelance journalist around Boston in the 1970s. Her work appeared in local newspapers and magazines, including the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Globe and Boston Magazine. She also contributed to New England Monthly, Yankee, Self, Parenting, Parents, McCalls and Ms. magazines. 

In 1985, she began writing about contemporary Jewish practice and the Jewish community. Her articles were published in Reform Judaism magazine, Hadassah magazine and for the webzine, jewishfamily.com. Diamant also has written a series of six popular guides to contemporary Jewish life.

A collection of personal essays, “Pitching My Tent: On Marriage, Motherhood, Friendship and Other Leaps of Faith,” was published in 2003.

For more information about the author visit: http://www.anitadiamant.com/