Elizabeth Lesser and Ben Fleisher, "Through The Storm: Developing Resilience, Trust and Love In Difficult Times"

Longtime Woodstockers Elizabeth Lesser and Ben Fleisher, LAc, have
been friends for many years. They have a lot in common—friends,
interests, careers (Elizabeth is the CoFounder of Omega Institute and
Ben is the CoFounder of Woodstock Healing Arts.)  Most recently they
have both walked the difficult and hopeful path of organ and bone
marrow donation and transplant. Please join us to hear Elizabeth and
Ben in conversation. Elizabeth will read selections from her books,
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love,
Loss & What Matters Most, and Ben will share insights from his own
journey of needing a kidney donation, resiliency, and community. The
evening is for anyone looking for inspiration and resilience—in our
personal lives and in these times. This talk, co-sponsored by The
Golden Notebook, is a fundraiser for Woodstock Healing Arts. Check it
out and buy your tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/through-the-storm-developing-resilience-trust-and-love-in-difficult-times-tickets-41307774666?aff=efbeventtix  For more information call: Woodstock Healing Arts 845-393-4245  or
The Golden Notebook 

Event Date: Friday, February 2, 2018 - 7:00pm

Address: Kleinert James Center For The Performing Arts

34 Tinker Street Woodstock, NY 12498

Austin Metze Reading and Signing

Raised in the Hudson Valley, Austin Metze and his wife Lainey have lived in Woodstock for over twenty seven years. The first half of his life was equally divided between painting and magazine art direction, working almost extensively for Time Warner, art directing for Time, People, Book-of-the-Month Club and others.  He has always written narrative poetry and he views his memoir as an outgrowth of his poems. In When life calls you out, it’s usually onto a Highway, he toggles back and forth between the two forms, sometimes combining them in the same piece. His work is highly visual in nature and it can be said that he is still painting, but this time with words.

“Growing up in the forties and fifties,” he says, “even though the roads hadn’t quite caught up to the  powerful machines that traveled them — in fact most were merely paved over horse trails — my generation took to the highway like today’s youth the internet.”

“As I write about the past I better understand who I am. I write with one eye on the rearview mirror and one on the road ahead,” says Metze

Event Date:  Saturday, February 3, 2018 - 4:00pm

Anne Nelson. "Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris"

“Immersive...Suzanne’s Children vividly dramatizes the stakes of acting morally in a time of brutality.”—The Wall Street Journal

A story of courage in the face of evil. The tense drama of Suzanne Spaak who risked and gave her life to save hundreds of Jewish children from deportation from Nazi Paris to Auschwitz. This is one of the untold stories of the Holocaust.

Suzanne Spaak was born into the Belgian Catholic elite and married into the country’s leading political family. Her brother-in-law was the Foreign Minister and her husband Claude was a playwright and patron of the painter Renée Magritte. In Paris in the late 1930s her friendship with a Polish Jewish refugee led her to her life’s purpose. When France fell and the Nazis occupied Paris, she joined the Resistance. She used her fortune and social status to enlist allies among wealthy Parisians and church groups.

Under the eyes of the Gestapo, Suzanne and women from the Jewish and Christian resistance groups “kidnapped” hundreds of Jewish children to save them from the gas chambers.

In the final year of the Occupation Suzanne was caught in the Gestapo dragnet that was pursuing a Soviet agent she had aided. She was executed shortly before the liberation of Paris. Suzanne Spaak is honored in Israel as one of the Righteous Among Nations.

Anne Nelson is an award-winning author and playwright. She is the author of Suzanne's Children; Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler; Murder Under Two Flags: The US, Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up; and The Guys: A Play. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, BBC, CBC, NPR, and PBS. Nelson is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She teaches at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs in New York Ci

Event Date: Sunday, February 4, 2018 - 3:00pm