Survivors of Genocide

3 Generations presented Roger Cohen, Paris Bureau Chief & former Op-Ed columnist, The New York Times, with the first annual Sidney Bernstein Award on December 4th, 2024.

The award was inspired by the man who was responsible for documenting the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the Sidney Bernstein Award celebrates a storyteller in any medium with the courage and integrity to chronicle our history as evidence for future generations.

Our 2024 lunch, was co-presented by Dr. Stephen D. Smith MBE, former Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation and Genocide expert and Jane Wells, 3G founder and creative director.

We are grateful to all those who supported and attended the event. Here is a video of Roger’s speech, and you can read the transcript here.

We have included an excerpt from the speech: "My title contains the word combustible. It's a long word, four syllables. Truth is a short word, a single syllable. So is blood. Buffeted people, and there are many, crave simplicity. In some ways the state of the world today is a story of truth vs. blood. When truth dies, when people are ready to believe anything, the foundation of a decent society collapses, and Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide" may be loosed upon the world. Here we are, to put it monosyllabicly, a long way from the hope of the Cold War's end. History, far from ending, has proved vigorous. In the Holy Land, the forever war of the state of Israel's creation rages on. As I.F. Stone put it almost six decades ago "Nowhere has religion been so zestful an excuse for fratricidal strife" and "nowhere else can one find a parallel" for such "ethnocentric fury." For most of my life, I believed in and argued for a two-state outcome that would bring peace and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike. My conviction, I regret to say, is tested to breaking point. In Ukraine, young men die for a square mile of soil gained one day, lost the next, in some grotesque drone-supplemented reenactment of the trenches of the Great War. I covered another European war, in Bosnia. There, 30 years ago, 100,000 people were killed; the bloodshed was only stopped by an ugly compromise that rewarded the perpetrators. But that was before Steve Jobs changed the world. Today, in the short-focus societies technology has forged, where a bombardment of weaponized information produces a plague of simplistic certainties, compromise is too a pale word. Better to beat the manly drums than meet in the anemic middle. Better to shriek vengeance than save lives. Blood is more compelling than truth, just ask the Russians. The dead die over and over, invoked to justify the next war of deification of the leader."