Half-Jew–Full Life: Book Talk with Dr. Georgette Bennett

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, join us to learn about Gary “Pips” Phillips, a survivor whose extraordinary story is not well known. Born in inter-war Berlin to an Aryan mother and a Jewish father, Pips could have been spared the worst of the Nazi war on Jews. But the very week that the Nuremberg laws were enacted, he chose to become a Bar Mitzvah–a choice that set him on a perilous path. 

In Half-Jew–Full Life, Dr. Georgette Bennett–a champion of interreligious relations, human rights, and conflict resolution for over three decades–looks at violence and resilience through the lens of a single person’s cinematic life story. Dr. Bennett will discuss her book in conversation with Rabbi Shuli Passow. 

Pips’ wartime experiences were marked by daring escapes, improbable rescues, and surprising survival in Nazi-controlled Berlin. Captured four times, he escaped three times, choosing to remain in Nazi custody the fourth time because there was nowhere to run in bombed-out Berlin. At the end of the war, he met his future wife, Olga Horvath, who had been imprisoned after surviving Auschwitz and the Death March to Bergen Belsen. Married, they emigrated to the United States to start a new life. 

Arriving in New York with nothing, Pips rose from waiter to co-owner of the world’s largest photo agency. Unlike Pips, Olga was unable to escape the shadow of her Holocaust experiences, and in a horrifying twist, jumped from the roof of their New York City high-rise after more than 50 years of marriage, leaving Pips grief-stricken, but also able to reinvent himself one more time. 

Beyond Pips himself, his story meshes with Georgette Bennett’s own story. A child of the Holocaust, born in a bombed-out apartment building in Budapest, most of her family in both Poland and Hungary was murdered. Although her parents miraculously survived, they went through all the horrors of the Nazi machine.

Dr. Georgette Bennett is an award-winning sociologist who has practiced mostly in non-academic settings. She is a widely published author, popular lecturer- including as a TED speaker- and former broadcast journalist. An innovative and entrepreneurial leader, she is an active philanthropist focusing on conflict resolution, human rights, humanitarian diplomacy, and interreligious relations. 

In 2013, Bennett founded the Multifaith Alliance (MFA) which has since worked to raise awareness and mobilize more than $630 million worth of humanitarian aid benefitting almost four million Syrian war victims. MFA is also working in Ukraine, Turkey, and Gaza, where it has delivered aid to more than 100,000 households. In 1992, Bennett founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the go-to organization for combatting religious prejudice. She is a co-founder of the Global Covenant of Religions/Global Covenant Partners, which focuses on delegitimizing the use of religion to justify violence and extremism. To that end, Bennett served in the U.S. State Department Religion and Foreign Policy initiative’s working group on conflict mitigation, tasked with developing recommendations for the U.S. Secretary of State on countering religion-based violence. 

In her earlier career as a criminologist, she did pioneering work in what is now known as Community Policing, consulted on criminal justice staffing studies for the U.S. Department of Justice, served as Personal Consultant to the New York City Police Commissioner, and managed the budget for all New York City’s criminal justice operations at its Office of Management and Budget.  

Bennett is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Past Chair of the Jewish Funders Network. She serves on the Board of Third Way and is an Advisory Board member for the International Rescue Committee and the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Among a myriad of recognitions, Bennett was a winner of the 2020 AARP Purpose Prize for her work with MFA. In 2021, she was selected as one of Forbes’ 50 over 50 Women of Impact, where she was cited, along with Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Najat Arafat Khelil, and Susan Rice as “women who helped shape the course of modern American foreign policy and human rights.”  

Bennett’s three latest books are Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence, Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By: How One Woman Confronted the Greatest Humanitarian Crisis of Our Time, and Half-Jew, Full Life–The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream. An earlier book, Crimewarps: The Future of Crime in America, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.