A Hundred Little Hitlers

Writer and Professor

Todd Gitlin is the author of 10 books, most recently Letters to a Young Activist and Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Image and Sound Overwhelms Our Lives. He has published a book of poems, Busy Being Born, and his poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Yale Review, and the New Republic. He has contributed to many books and published widely in general periodicals and scholarly journals.

Gitlin has received grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lectures frequently on culture and politics in the United States and abroad. He has been a columnist at the New York Observer and the San Francisco Examiner, is on the editorial boards of Dissent and the American Scholar, and is a contributing editor of Theory and Society, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Communication Review, and Journalism.

He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. Gitlin was for 16 years a professor of sociology and direct of the mass communications program at UC-Berkeley, and for seven years a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University. He is now a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs

Gara LaMarche is vice president and director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute. Before joining OSI in 1996, LaMarche served as associate director of Human Rights Watch and was director of its Free Expression Project (1990-1996) and the Freedom-To-Write Program of the PEN American Center (1988-1990). From 1976 to 1988, he served in a variety of positions with the American Civil Liberties Union, including associate director of its New York branch (1979-1984) and executive director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union (1984-1988). In 1988-1989, he was a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York.

LaMarche is the author of more than 75 articles on civil liberties and human rights topics and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Nation, and the Texas Observer. He is the editor of Speech and Equality: Do We Really Have to Choose? (New York University Press, 1996).

LaMarche serves on the board of directors of Article 19, the U.S. advisory committee for Index on Censorship, a London-based human rights magazine, and the advisory committee for the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project.

Journalist and Author

Elinor Langer is a writer whose work on literary and political subjects has appeared in the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.

Her recent book, A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America (Metropolitan Books, 2003), was the 2001 finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award for work-in progress and has now been named one of five finalists for the Book of the Month Club's best non-fiction book of 2003. Langer received an Individual Project Fellowship from the Open Society Institute for the book.

She was awarded both Guggenheim and Bunting fellowships in connection with Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell, which was nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award in biography in 1984. Her Inside the New York Telephone Company, a first-person account of life as a customer service representative, was published in 1969 and is still read today, as is her Notes for Next Time: A Memoir of the 1960s. The latter, published in Working Papers in 1973, is one of the earliest critical discussions of the 1960s radical movement.

President, Open Society Institute

Before joining the Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Soros foundations network as president in September 1993, Aryeh Neier spent 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder. Prior to that, he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for 15 years, including eight as national director.

From 1978 to 1991, Neier served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University, and he has lectured at a number of colleges and universities in the United States (including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, New York University, and the University of California at Berkeley) and at universities in many other countries. He is the recipient of three honorary doctorates (Hofstra University, Hamilton College, and the State University of New York at Binghamton) and the American Bar Association's Gavel Award.

Neier is the author of six books: Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You (1975, Scarborough House); Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution (1976, Stein and Day); Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and the Risks of Freedom (1979, E.P. Dutton); Only Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change (1982, Wesleyan University Press); War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (1998, Times Books); and Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights (2003, Public Affairs). Neier has also contributed chapters to more than 25 books.

He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, a columnist for the Nation, and has also published in such periodicals as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Foreign Policy, Dissent and a number of law journals. He has contributed more than 100 op-ed articles to newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Neier was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. An internationally recognized expert on human rights, he has conducted investigations of human rights abuses in more than 40 countries around the world. Over the past two decades, he has been directly engaged in the global debate on accountability and bringing to justice those who have committed crimes against humanity, the subject of his latest book, Taking Liberties. He played a leading role in the establishment of the international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia.