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Michael Berenbaum, PhD

Michael Berenbaum

Michael Berenbaum, PhD

Director of Sigi Ziering Institute Professor of Jewish Studies

mberenbaum@ajula.edu

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Education

Queens College, B.A. (Philosophy) 1967
Jewish Theological Seminary, 1967
Hebrew University, 1966
Boston University, (Philosophy) 1969
Florida State University, Ph.D. 1975
(Humanities: Religion and Culture), 1975
Dennison University, Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris Causa) (2000)
Nazareth College, Doctor of Divinity (Honoris Causa) (1995)
Rabbinic Ordination 

Biography

Michael Berenbaum is the director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics, and a Professor of Jewish Studies at AJU since 2002. He is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and the development of historical films.

Dr. Berenbaum joined the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1979. In 1987, he returned to oversee the development of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, spending a decade as the project director, and later as the first director of its Research Institute. He served as the Ida E. King Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at Richard Stockton College for 1999-2000, and the Strassler Family Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at Clark University in 2000.

 

Publications

Dr. Berenbaum is the author and editor of eighteen books, scores of scholarly articles and hundreds of journalistic pieces. He won the Simon Rockower Memorial Award of the American Jewish Press Association three times in three different categories during a two-year period. 

He is also the Executive Editor of the New Encyclopaedia Judaica.  The 22 volume, sixteen million word second edition transformed and improved the now classic 1972 work.  The EJ was recently awarded the Dartmouth Medal by the American Library Association for the outstanding reference work of 2006.
Some of his books:

  • Report to the President, President's Commission on the Holocaust (1979).
  • After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (1990).
  • The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust (1993 & 2006.)
  • The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1979. Reprinted as Elie Wiesel: God, The Holocaust, and the Children of Israel (1994).
  • Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994).
  • A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors (2003).
  • Witness to the Holocaust (1997).
  • Co-Editor with J. Shawn Landres, After the Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences (2004.).
  • Editor, Murder Most Merciful: Essays on the Ethical Conundrum Occasioned by Sigi Ziering’s The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff (2005).
  • Not Your Fathers Antisemitism (2008)

 

Additional Professional Accomplishments

Additional Content

In film, his work as Co-Producer of One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story was recognized with an Academy Award, an Emmy Award and the Cable Ace Award. He was the historical consultant on The Shoah Foundation's Documentary, The Last Days, which won an Academy Award for the best feature length documentary of 1998.  In 2001, Berenbaum was a historical consultant or chief historical consultant for

  • HBO's Conspiracy, recently nominated for 10 Emmy awards,
  • NBC's Uprising
  • The History Channel's The Holocaust: The Untold Story, which won the CINE Golden Eagle Award and a Silver Medal at the US International Film and Video Festival.

He was the executive producer, writer and historian for a film entitled Desperate Hours on Turkey and the Holocaust, which was broadcast on PBS. Among his more recent films are About Face, Swimming in Auschwitz, and Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust as well as Blessed Be the Match, the story of Hannah Senesch.

He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Stephen Spielberg’s The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which entailed taking 50,000 testimonies from 32 countries in 57 languages.