Michael Moritz joins us with his deeply moving family story of displacement and otherness in the wake of the Holocaust—a legacy that must be heeded today.
About the Book
Sorting through papers and photographs after his mother’s death, Michael Moritz uncovered the history of close family members murdered by the Nazis. Although his parents managed to escape from Germany, exploring their journey took Moritz into a past of grief and dark shadows cast on Jewish life by the Holocaust.
Moritz’s parents arrived as child refugees in London before settling in Cardiff, Wales, after the war. But a sense of alienation haunted the family for nearly a century: the feeling of being an outsider, or Ausländer, passed from his parents to Moritz himself during his childhood and even in his adopted home of California, where he has become one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated investors.
“As the shadows of Trump lengthened, the refrain I had heard from my parents rang ever more loudly... ‘If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here.’”
Both a haunting elegy to his family heritage and a disturbingly relevant clarion call to resist fascism, Ausländer shows what can happen to anyone, anywhere, when ordinary people grant license to despots–and the trauma that remains for those who survive their reign.
About the Speakers
Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954. A former TIME journalist and regular contributor to the Financial Times, he is the author of several books, including The Little Kingdom, the story of Apple's years as a private business. He was a partner in Sequoia Capital for 35 years and led the business between 1995 and 2012, becoming one of the most successful investors of his generation. Together with his wife, the author Harriet Heyman, he formed Crankstart, a San Francisco–based foundation devoted to helping those who might otherwise be left behind.
Adam Lashinsky is a city columnist for The San Francisco Standard. He also writes a monthly column for The Washington Post. He is the former executive editor of Fortune Magazine, where he covered Silicon Valley and Wall Street for nearly 20 years. His work has appeared in The Information, Airmail News, The Financial Times, Business Insider, Esquire, The Economist, and The New York Times. In the spring of 2023, he was the A.M. Rosenthal Writer in Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Lashinsky is the author of two books, Insider Apple: How America’s Most Admire—and Secretive—Company Really Works (2012) and Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination (2017). He is at work on a third, a biography of William Safire, to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2027. Earlier in his career he worked at TheStreet.com, The San Jose Mercury News, Crain’s Chicago Business, and, as a Henry Luce Scholar, The Nikkei Weekly. A native of Chicago and a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Lashinsky lives in San Francisco.
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