Conversation with...Dr. Michael Berenbaum
Revised Encyclopaedia Judaica records Jewish life at the turn of the millenium

By Judie Jacobson
Published: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 1:15 PM EDT
Jewish Ledger

American scholar, professor, author and filmmaker Dr. Michael Berenbaum is the executive editor of the second edition of the classic Encyclopaedia Judaica, which will be published in December by Thomson Gale and Keter Publishing House.

Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, Berenbaum served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., overseeing its creation. For the past three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles. 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.

Recently, the Ledger spoke with Berenbaum about the new 22-volume Encyclopaedia Judaica, which will include 22,000 entries on Jewish life, culture, history and religion.

Q: Tell us about the interesting history of the Encyclopaedia Judaica and how the notion to revise it came about.

A: A man by the name of Nachum Goldman who was later president of the World Jewish Congress, conceived of the idea, during a time in which Jews were living in Germany, that there should be the creation of a grand encyclopedia to speak of the Jewish contribution to culture and the state of Jewish knowledge. He thought that the generation that would do it was the generation of German Jewish scholarship that was flourishing in the '20s and the early '30s. Hitler, naturally, brought an end to that project and the rise of Nazism made it impossible to complete at that time. In the '60s Goldman raised the idea again with a transplanted generation of scholars, and it was created in the '60s, published in the '70s and updated periodically by yearbooks. In the early '90s there was an attempt to make the encyclopedia available on CD for the new generation that was computer literate. Then, the idea was broached by the two original partners in this project, Keter (Publishing House) and Macmillan (Reference USA, a division of Thomson Gale), that it was time for a new encyclopedia. The question was, how do we update it? We had two principles in mind. The first was that we were dealing with a classic work and, consequently, we have to preserve that status or the work, because much could be gained, but also much could be lost. And the second was that we had to go in and supplement it, enhance it, intensify it and update it. And that's what we did.

Q: It must have been an enormous undertaking. How did you manage to accomplish it successfully?

A: It's been a project of 3 1/2 years, and it left us in awe of the original generation that did it, because we were able to do it only because of the existence of e-mail and advanced communication. Thirty years ago there wasn't even Fed Ex yet or Internet. So the idea that they were able to pursue a work on this grand a scale with this many contributors without the enhancements of contemporary technology leaves us awestruck.

No one today can have an encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism. It's too vast. There are too many areas of specialization...too many dimensions of culture - everything from sports to music to architecture to literature to film to business to science to each of the fields of science to Jewish scholarship, etc. So we gathered 50 people to serve as editors of certain segments of the encyclopedia; what we call area or field editors. They wrote in the areas they knew, and selected other writers to write in the areas they did not know or for which there was greater specialization.

Ultimately, we had 2,500 new entries...five million additional words...some six additional volumes to the original.

Q: How did you become involved in this project?

A: I got the assignment accidentally. The first encyclopedia had really been an Israeli-centered creation. The realization was that scholarship was primarily centered in the U.S. and in Israel, and they would have to bring on an American executive editor to work with the Israeli editor-in-chief in a coordinated fashion to get things done. They had gone through a list of people and it turned out that I had done books previously with a couple of the people involved and they felt they could work with me. I was selected not because I knew everything, but because I could organize and get people who knew what they needed to know and work with people to be able to get it done.

Q: Was there any one major change that sets this set of volumes apart from its predecessor?

A: We made a very specific effort to include women, who had been only 1.25% of the original version. Women represent 50% of the Jewish people - they shouldn't be 1.25% of the encyclopedia and it reflected itself in a couple of ways. For example, the article on mikveh (ritual bath) had everything except what the experience of the woman was when she went into a mikveh...which leaves something out. We looked at hundreds of ways of including women in the encyclopedia because we felt that was a serious omission of the previous version.

We also included women among our editors.

For example, Judith Baskin, president of the Association of Jewish Studies, was our editor on women's issues. Susannah Heschel did our article on feminism. And we had many women contributors.

Q: Is there a special significance to the Encyclopaedia Judaica to world Jewry at this particular point in time?

A: The exciting thing to recognize, especially in this era when Jews are focused on so many of our problems, is how spectacular has been the transformation of Jewish life over the last 35 years in virtually every dimension. Israel was the home of a minority of the Jewish people. It will soon become the largest single center of Jewish life. Its contribution in art, music, science, literature, philosophy and everything else is enormously well established now. The American Jewish community has migrated in many directions - to cities like Las Vega and Phoenix...the entire Florida experience. The Association of Jewish Studies was established in 1969 with less than 20 members. By 2004 it had 1400-1500 members teaching Judaic studies in universities throughout the world. The German Jewish community looked like it was going to disappear. It is today the largest growing European community and the fastest growing Jewish community in the world. Russian Jews have migrated in vast numbers to the United States, to Israel and to Germany. In Eastern Europe you have Jewish communities now that are remnants of what they once were, but free to be Jewish and free to create a Jewish future. Jewish scholarship is proliferating. Jews have become an integral part of world culture in science and literature and physics and sports...in almost every dimension imaginable. So that's part of the enormous excitement and the vast contribution of the Jewish people to its own culture and to world culture.

Also, Jews now feel very deeply about being Jewish and more comfortable about expressing it in public so that the number of people who are affirming their Jewishness is quite extraordinary.

We were interested in writing material that will not only be readable for a quarter of a century, but when somebody takes it off the shelf 100 or 150 years from now and reads it, they will say this is what world Jewry was like and this is what Jewish life and culture was like at the turn of the 21st century. It's a way of recording who we are and what we are and where we are as we are part of the new millennium.