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.
Miles Lerman, who was central to the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, died January 22 after a long illness. Lerman, who was 88, began his work on behalf of the museum in 1979, when then-president Jimmy Carter named him to the advisory board of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. In the…
Raul Hilberg, the pioneering scholar in the academic study of the Holocaust, died of lung cancer August 4 in Burlington, Vermont. He was 81. Hilberg is best known and most deeply revered for his monumental work “The Destruction of the European Jews,” which appeared in 1961 and was widely considered the founding text of Holocaust…
Just hours after Sigmund Strochlitz’s family rose from shiva to reenter the world of the living, Ben Meed died and trauma again reverberated through the survivor community. Two giants had fallen; their contributions were singular and monumental. Together they had done so much to advance the cause of remembrance. Their backgrounds and their experiences were…
Instead of being grounds for prosecution, perhaps the influence Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were trying to exert — making officials and the public aware of the danger from Iran — should be heralded. Last week, federal judge T.S. Ellis III declared that the law under which the two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee…
The death of Arthur Hertzberg last week marks more than the passing of a great American Jewish personality. It reminds us of the rarity of a figure like Hertzberg, who paid little heed to the boundaries separating academic scholarship, rabbinic service, social activism and Jewish diplomacy. Indeed, his death harks back to an era in…
The death of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal brings to a close a storied career shrouded in achievement, in dazzle and perhaps even in mystery. Wiesenthal’s life, like those of all Holocaust survivors, may be described in three chapters: “Before,” “During” and “After.” The last is the most mysterious. “Before” was the life of a young…
Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories By Omer Bartov Cornell University Press, 248 pages, $18.95. * * *| Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective By Dan Michman Vallentine Mitchell, 435 pages, $29.50. * * *| At several Holocaust conferences in recent years, the distinguished literary scholar Lawrence Langer has murmured in frustration: “Why don’t historians…
A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Knoff, 362 pages, $25. * * *| The power of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s latest book, “A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair,”…
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