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.

Confirmed Speakers include:

• 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 (both Lantern Books)


• Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat (both 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)


• Andrea Smith (Cherokee), co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project, author of Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, co-editor of The Color of Violence, and editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (all South End Press)

Registration: $75. Students/Seniors: $60. NYU students/faculty: free.

To register, send check or money order to UPC, PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405. Or register by credit card at www.upc-online.org

Maximum attendance capacity: 148. Register by March 15. $100 after March 15.