Your browser may
not support display of this image.Michael Berenbaum is a writer,
lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of
museums and the development of historical films. He is director of the
Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious
Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University
(formerly the University of Judaism) where he is also a Professor of
Jewish Studies. In the past he has 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.
He is the Executive Editor of the New Encyclopaedia Judaica that
reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now
classic 1972 work and will run some 22 volumes, six million words with
25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge.
For the three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of
the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the
Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of
Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From
1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as
Director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington,
Opinion-Page Editor of the Washington Jewish Week and Deputy Director
of the President's Commission on the Holocaust where he authored its
Report to the President. He has previously taught at Wesleyan
University, Yale University and has served as a visiting professor at
three of the major Washington area universities — George
Washington University, The University of Maryland, and American
University.
Berenbaum is the author and editor of sixteen books, scores of
scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. Of his book,
After Tragedy and Triumph, Raul Hilberg said, "All those who want to
read only one book about the condition of Jewry in 1990 would do well
to choose Michael Berenbaum… In his description of contemporary
Jewish thought, he sacrifices neither complexity nor lucidity." Charles
Silberman praised The World Must Know as “a majestic and
profoundly moving history of the Holocaust…It is must reading
for anyone who would like to be human in the post-Holocaust world." The
Village Voice praised Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp with, "The
scholarship, broad and deep, makes this the definitive book on one of
our century's defining horrors."
His most recent books include: A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in
the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has
Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on
Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Relgious Tolerance and Pluralism
occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s
film, The Passion. Johns Hopkins University Press has just published a
second edition of The World Must Know. He is also the editor of Murder
Most Merciful: Essays on the Moral Conundrum Occasioned by Sigi Ziering
The Trial of Herbert Bierhoff.
Among his other works are A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and
Murdered by the Nazis, The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections
on the Works of Elie Wiesel, and Witness to the Holocaust: An
Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of Its
Victims, Perpetrators, and Bystanders. He was co-editor on several
works, including The Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical
Implications (with John Roth), The Holocaust and History: The Known,
the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined (with Abraham Peck), and
most recently, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have
Attempted It? ( with Michael Neufeld). He is the author of A
Promise to Remember co-editor of Martyrdom: The History of an
Idea.
