Alumni Book Club · Our Next Selection
The Sunflower
On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness — by Simon Wiesenthal
Our first gathering asked how a survivor chooses freedom after the unimaginable. Our second asks something harder, and leaves it unresolved on purpose.
While imprisoned in a concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was pulled from a work detail and brought to a hospital room. A dying SS soldier wanted to confess what he had done to a Jewish prisoner — any Jewish prisoner — and to be forgiven for it. Wiesenthal listened. Then he stood up and left the room without a word.
He spent the rest of his life asking whether that silence was right. Decades later he put the question to others: What would you have done? The second half of the book is their answer — a symposium of theologians, writers, jurists, and fellow survivors, including the Dalai Lama, Harold S. Kushner, Desmond Tutu, Dith Pran, and Harry Wu. They do not agree with each other. That disagreement is the point.
Why we chose it
Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust and spent the decades that followed pursuing accountability for it. He is not a neutral narrator of this question, and the book does not pretend otherwise. What it offers instead is a structure our alumni already know well: a story that will not resolve into a lesson, held open long enough for a group of people to sit inside it together.
It is a short book. It is not an easy one. Come with your answer, and be ready to have it moved.
Some of what we will discuss
- Can forgiveness be granted on behalf of people who are no longer alive to grant it?
- Is Wiesenthal’s silence a refusal, a mercy, or something else entirely?
- What is the difference between forgiving, excusing, and forgetting?
- Where do the responses in the symposium land for you — and why that one?
When & Where
Sunday
November 1, 2026
10AM LA · 12PM CHI · 1PM NY · 6PM UK · Online via Zoom
Clocks change that morning. Daylight Saving Time ends in the U.S. at 2 a.m. on Sunday, November 1 — set your clocks back one hour before we meet.
Register NowAn English-language book club, open to all alumni. Questions? bookclub@motl.org
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