Michael Berenbaum is a distinguished professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He has created Holocaust and human rights museums on three continents and in several American cities, headed the Shoah Visual History Foundation and was the executive editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.
Israel Gutman, Israel’s most prominent survivor historian, died in Jerusalem on October 1. A native of Warsaw, Gutman was only a teenager when the Germans invaded his Poland. His parents and his older sister died in the Warsaw ghetto; his younger sister was part of the famed Janusz Korczak orphanage, led by the charismatic pediatrician…
Vladka Meed, one of the last surviving leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, died in Phoenix on November 21 just before her 91st birthday. Born Feyge Peltel in Praga (a district of Warsaw, Poland,) she joined the youth arm of the Jewish Labor Bund at age 14 and was thereafter a Bund activist through the…
Holocaust scholar Henry Friedlander, a Berlin-born survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and of Auschwitz, Neuengamme and Ravensbrueck who went on to establish the significance of Hitler’s mass murder of the disabled as a precursor to the Shoah, died on October 17 in Maine after a protracted illness. He was 82. As with many survivors, Friedlander…
Jeff Cohen’s “The Soap Myth,” as produced by the National Jewish Theater Foundation and directed by Arnold Mittleman, has brought to life on the New York stage the inherent tensions between Holocaust historians and Holocaust survivors over facts and interpretation of facts. Time and again, survivors speak of the Nazis’ making human fat into soap,…
Peter Novick argued that the Holocaust had been overemphasized in American culture and manipulated by prominent Jewish organizations to preclude any criticism of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. He asserted that it was used to strengthen Jewish identity by making a long-defeated enemy central to that identity at precisely the point when Jews have gained…
The Muselmann at the Water Cooler Eli Pfefferkorn Academic Studies Press, 215 pages, $59.95 Since the passage of time plays tricks with memory, memoirs written in proximity to the Holocaust ordinarily are given greater credence than later works. One would imagine that a survivor’s account written more than 65 years after the Holocaust could not…
Hyman Bookbinder, the legendary longtime Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee who died July 21, was the most passionate moderate I have ever known. Fair and intense, he was fierce in his convictions, but equally committed to civility and decency. I first met Bookie, who was 95 at the time of his death, when…
Marilyn Henry was the quintessential old-school girl reporter — more Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday” than Brenda Starr. Her laser-sharp brain could cut through the most complex philosophical, financial, legal, religious and arcane data to get to the heart of a story. Her two masterworks were “Twice Stolen,” an almost-finished book project, aborted by…
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