Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate
Airs Sundays, November 17 and 24 at 10 p.m. ET
on PBS stations nationwide (check local listings)
Panelist Biographies
Helen Whitney – Filmmaker
Helen Whitney is an acclaimed writer, producer and director. She has more than 30 years
of experience producing dramatic features and documentary films. Her subjects have
stretched across a broad spectrum of topics including youth gangs; a portrait of the 1996
presidential candidates; a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts; the McCarthy Era; Pope
John Paul II; and photographer Richard Avedon. Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,
arguably Whitney’s best known film was PBS' two-hour special on 9/11, which
explored the spiritual aftershocks of this horrific event. Her film The Mormons was a
four hour PBS series, the first collaboration between American Experience and Frontline.
In her feature films Whitney has worked with many distinguished actors. Among them:
Lindsey Crouse, Austin Pendleton, Brenda Fricker and David Strathairn. Amongst
Whitney’s many accolades are an Oscar nomination; two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia
University Awards; a George Foster Peabody Award; an Edward R. Murrow Award for
distinguished journalism; an Emmy Award; and awards from The Writer’s Guild
of America, The Director’s Guild of America, The Hamptons International Film Festival
and The San Francisco International Film Festival. Whitney is a sought after lecturer and
frequently speaks at universities, divinity schools, museums and art institutes. She has
served as the Director of the Board of Film Forum in New York City. She has been artist
in residence at six universities and is a member of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows
Program.
Terri Jentz – Film Subject
Terri Jentz’s story of an attack perpetrated against her when she was a college student is
spotlighted in Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate. Jentz is a journalist,
screenwriter, activist and author of the acclaimed memoir Strange Piece of Paradise, a
finalist in 2006 for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Book
Award and an Edgar Allan Poe Award in mystery writing. A blend of investigative
journalism, memoir, detective story, travelogue and philosophical meditation, the book is
the story of Jentz’s investigation into the unsolved attempted murder against her and her
college roommate in the Oregon desert in 1977. The New York Times in its Sunday book
review wrote, “Imagine that it had been Truman Capote himself who’d been savaged in
Holcomb, Kan., and that he had survived to describe his ordeal. That is the level of
command and sinew at work in the writing.” Jentz is currently adapting the book into a
feature film. She advocates for the necessity of justice as a vital component of peace in an
essay she wrote for an anthology, Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the
World, edited by author/activist Susan Griffin, to be published by the University of
California Press in 2011.
Liesbeth Gerritsen, Ph.D. – Film Subject
Liesbeth Gerritsen’s story of leaving her family to move to Oregon and become a
counselor is featured in Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate. Gerritsen is a
mental health professional specializing in community-based crisis intervention work. She
coordinates the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program for the Portland, Oregon, Police
Bureau. The training Gerritsen provides focuses on police interaction with people in
crisis, with a special emphasis on people who suffer from mental health disorders. She is
a member of the Police Bureau’s Hostage Negotiation Team and provides mental health
consultation on incidents. She also works for a mobile mental health crisis team that
responds onsite to mental health emergencies. Gerritsen is interested in the dynamics of
conflict in all settings, from the personal to the political. She also consults with private
businesses and provides trainings in de-escalation and crisis communication.
Daniel Glick – Film Subject
Daniel Glick and his children’s experience of being left by his then wife, Liesbeth
Gerritsen, is examined in Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate. Glick is a
journalist and author of two non-fiction books. The most recent, Monkey Dancing: A
Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, is an account of a half-year,
around-the-world journey he took with his 13-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter
after his wife moved out of state and his older brother died of cancer. His first book,
Powder Burn: Arson, Money, and Mystery on Vail Mountain, is a non-fiction whodunit
based on the $12 million act of eco-terrorism at Vail in 1998. Glick worked for
Newsweek for 13 years, both as a Washington correspondent and as a roving Rocky
Mountain correspondent based in Colorado. His journalism career has taken him from
Haiti to the Russian Far East, from Air Force One to lynx dens in the southern Rockies.
He has also written for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, Harpers, The
Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Audubon, Esquire
and numerous other publications. He contributed to two anthologies: I Wanna Be
Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers, which includes essays by Barbara
Kingsolver, Dave Barry and Anna Quindlen; and Far from Home: Father-Daughter
Travel Adventures. He also contributed a chapter about climate change science for a
photo book published by Braided River books in February 2008 entitled The Last Polar
Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warmer World. In 2006, he received a Knight International
Press fellowship in Algeria, where he lived with his two children. In 2008, he cofounded The Story Group, an independent multimedia journalism company. He received
his masters degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of
California at Berkeley. Glick resides in Lafayette, Colorado.
Thane Rosenbaum – Film Expert
Thane Rosenbaum served as a key consultant on Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time
to Hate focusing on the issues of forgiveness in the lives of nations. Rosenbaum is an
essayist, law professor and author of the novels The Golems of Gotham (a San Francisco
Chronicle Top 100 Book), Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible, which received the
Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best book of Jewish-American fiction. His articles,
reviews and essays appear frequently in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the Huffington Post, among other national
publications. He moderates an annual series of discussions on Jewish culture and politics
at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. He is the John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in
Law at Fordham Law School, where he teaches courses in human rights, legal
humanities, law and literature, and also directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society
(www.forumonlawcultureandsociety.org). Rosenbaum is also the author of The Myth of
Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right, which was one of the
San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2004. He is the editor of the anthology, Law
Lit: From Atticus Finch to The Practice: A Collection of Great Writing about the Law.
For more information contact:
Cecily Van Praagh
703.998.2756
cvanpraagh@weta.com