Martin Matustik is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion and Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.
Prof. Martin J. Beck Matustik was born in what is now Slovakia in 1957 and orphaned at the age of 14. Later, as an act of defiance against communism authoritarianism, he became a co-signatory, along with Vaclav Havel and others, of Charta 77. He ultimately fled Czechoslovakia, landing in the United States to become a respected academic. Two letters from Australian relatives revealed his Jewish origin and an untold genealogical history that his mother had kept form him. His subsequent research and most recent book became an unusual exercise in “post memory,” placed on the context of world history, the plight of the jews, and the global conflict against tyranny the plagued the twentieth century.