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.
The number of visitors to Auschwitz is growing by the year, even as the memory of the events that transpired there grows increasingly distant. These are among the reasons that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has decided to revamp its exhibitions for the 21st century. The museum’s decision is a wise one. The tools available to…
I am not presently a New Yorker — though as one who was raised in New York it pains me to say so — but I am a student of history, so I must address two issues that have come up in the debate over the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. One,…
Jihad and Genocide By Richard L. Rubenstein Rowman & Littlefield, 260 pages, $59.95. Richard L. Rubenstein, my doctoral advisor, first rose to prominence with his path-breaking 1966 book, “After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism.” Improperly regarded as the Jewish contribution to the then fashionable “death of God debate,” it argued that no theology could…
Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was the fighter who stayed behind. Unlike his fellow surviving uprising leaders, Edelman did not leave Poland after the war. A Bundist, he was not attracted to Palestine; a socialist, perhaps he was not quite ready to become a capitalist in the United…
From its inception, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has regarded itself — and been regarded by others — as a high-priority target, and for good reason. Though not a Jewish institution but a government institution, it is one of the most visible manifestations of the prominence of American Jewry — its…
From its inception, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has regarded itself — and been regarded by others — as a high priority target, and for good reason. Though not a Jewish institution, but a government institution, it is one of the most visible institutions that reflect the prominence of American Jewry — its creators…
Two years ago, an MBA student whom I mentored wrote her thesis on how major Holocaust organizations were planning to deal with the inevitable — the fact that soon, all too soon, there would be no survivors. Her conclusion was sobering. The leadership of every institution acknowledged the problem and dreaded that moment. What were…
Tom Lantos, the lone Holocaust survivor to serve in America’s Congress, died Monday morning after a battle with cancer of the esophagus. He was 80. Lantos, a Democrat, was first elected in 1981 from a district near San Francisco. Since then, he had risen up to become the democratic party’s leading voice on human rights,…
100% of profits support our journalism
