Press Release - The International Freedom Center

November, 2004

Center reaches out to experts for content

The International Freedom Center continues to reach out to scholars, activists and museum professionals around the world as it works to build its content and programming.

On November 8, the Center offered its first program, a luncheon speech by Natan Sharansky, Soviet dissident, Israeli minister and author of the newly-published The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. The Sharansky lunch was hosted by New York University president John Sexton, International Freedom Center co-founders Tom Bernstein and Peter Kunhardt and PublicAffairs publisher Peter Osnos. PublicAffairs is Sharansky’s publisher. The lunch was held at NYU’s official presidential residence.

Sharansky explained his perceived division of the world into free societies and what he calls “fear societies.” He proclaimed his belief that democracy is not beyond any nation's reach, that the spread of freedom is essential for our security and that there is much that can be done to promote it around the world. Freedom, in Sharansky’s view, is rooted in the right to dissent, to walk into the town square and declare one's views without fear of punishment or reprisal.

The International Freedom Center’s content team has also been holding a number ofprivate meetings to explore concepts and exchange ideas. Such sessions, for which the content team is using the artistic term “charettes,” were held in October with Alex Boraine and Juan Mendez of the International Center for Transitional Justice and with scholar and journalist Fareed Zakaria, author of The Future of Freedom.

Charettes in November have included one with the staff of Freedom House, focusing in particular on their forthcoming work on women’s freedom in North Africa and the Middle East, and with Walter Issacson of the Aspen Institute. Upcoming charettes will include, attorney, author and former White House special counsel Theodore Sorensen, a session with historican David Hackett Fischer, author of the recent book Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, and also one with Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson Schol at Princeton, have been scheduled for early January.

The Center also continues its work as a member of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. Editorial Director Philip Kunhardt attended the latest Coalition meeting in Terezinin the Czech Republic, updating the group on the International Freedom Center’s progress and exchanging content ideas with the other attendees.

Finally, the architecture of the Center’s new building at the World Trade Center site will itself have very important content implications in its exterior design and its interior exhibit and other public space. Toward this end, leaders of the Center took our architects, from the Norwegian firm Snohetta, on early-November visits to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

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