Joseph Berger, New York Times columnist and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust, will speak at Hamilton College on Thursday, Nov. 30, at 7:30 p.m., in the Kennedy Auditorium of the Science Center. It is free and open to the public.
Berger's most recent book, Displaced Persons, is a memoir about his family's experience as refugees in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Berger immigrated from the Soviet Union at the age of 5. Newsday praised the book saying, "With humor, compassion and honesty Displaced Persons portrays not only the vanished Europe of prewar Jewry but the vanished New York of Berger's childhood."
Berger has been a reporter and editor with The Times since 1984. He was a religion correspondent from 1985 to 1987, covering the Pope's trip to 10 American cities in nine days, and national education correspondent from 1987 to 1990, a period when American school curricula were under attack as too European-focused. He was the recipient of the 1993 Education Writers Association award for exposing abuses in bilingual education. For six years Berger was chief of the bureau that covers upstate New York, Westchester and the Hudson Valley. In September 1999, he was appointed deputy education editor.
Prior to joining the Times, Berger worked as Newsday's religion writer, where he three times won the Supple Award given by the Religion Newswriters Association, its highest honor. Berger also worked at The New York Post, covering such assignments as the 1973 Middle East War and Watergate. He is also the author of The Young Scientists, a study of the country's top science high schools and their students
