Cecile Insdorf (1922-2010)

Cecile Insdorf, was a Holocaust survivor and renowned educator for more than three decades at Hunter College, died on August 15, 2010 in her Manhattan apartment. After she retired from teaching and advising in May 2005, Hunter named “The Cecile Insdorf Foreign Language Screening Room” in her honor. Cecile overcame daunting obstacles to receive her Ph.D. in French at CUNY Graduate Center in 1972 and became a celebrated public figure.

Born in 1922 in Cracow, Poland, she was imprisoned in the camps of Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and lost her entire family during the Holocaust. After World War II, she made her way to Paris, where she met and married Michael Insdorf, also a Holocaust survivor from Poland. Her doctoral dissertation, “Montaigne and Feminism,” was a pioneering study published in 1977 by the University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures. After the death of her husband in 1985, she added to her courses in French literature a new class in film adaptation. Among the guest speakers she brought to her “Film and the French Novel” class were Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, Jim Sheridan, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Pakula, Alec Baldwin, and Milos Forman. For more than 20 years, she was a member of the Executive Committee of the General Faculty as Part-Time Faculty Representative.

In 2001, she created – and was the Director of – the Romance Languages Film Festival, bringing to Hunter celebrities who introduced favorite foreign motion pictures. These included Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar, Sir Ben Kingsley, John Turturro, Jeremy Irons, Paul Auster and Ken Burns. In December of 2005, the National Arts Club honored her (and daughter Annette) with their Gold Medal for contribution to French culture in the U.S. In May of 2007, she was honored with the Special Achievement Award from the Ph.D. Alumni Association of CUNY.

She is survived by her daughter Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University, and son-in-law, actor and teacher Mark Ethan Toporek.