Confronting the Complexity of Holocaust Scholarship

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Liberation 75, is excited to offer the opportunity engage in our new series: Confronting the Complexity of Holocaust Scholarship: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of Holocaust Studies

The rise of anti-Semitism across the globe alongside the current data that points to a serious void in understanding about the Holocaust in the 21st century shines a light on a critical need to continue the task of Holocaust Scholars to honor the memory of the Shoah.

In each of our 9 part series we will meet Top Scholars in the field and focus on their research and scholarship.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For 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 Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.

Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, 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, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Lawrence L. Langer holds an extensive teaching background that began at the University of Connecticut in 1957, where he was an English instructor until 1958, when he began teaching at Simmons College as an Instructor to a Professor of English until 1976. Ensuing this, in the Spring of 1977, he began teaching at Yale University where he was an English lecturer and Guest Fellow of Morse College. Between 1976 and 1992, Langer returned to Simmons College and continued there as a Professor of English and Holder of the Alumnae Endowed Chair. Presently, Langer remains the Alumnae Chair Professor of English, emeritus. In Fall 2002, Langer was a Strassler Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Awards 
Between 1963 and 1964, Lawrence L. Langer was recognized as a fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Graz in Graz, Austria. Langer received an NEH Fellowship for Independent Studies and Research between 1978 and 1979.  Between 1988 and 1989, Langer received the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award at Simmons College.  Between 1989 and 1990, Langer was awarded the NEH Senior Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars. During Summer 1991 and between 1993 and 1996, Langer was the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar on “Literature of the Holocaust” at Simmons College.  Between September and December of 1996, Langer was the JB & Maurice Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the US Holocaust Research Center of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.  From September to December of 1997, Langer was prestiged as a Koerner Fellow for the Study of the Holocaust, Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Yarnton Manor, Oxford, England.  In May 2003, Langer served as the Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.  In 1996, Langer was awarded the honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters from Simmons College, which he also received in 2000 from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and in 2002 from Ohio Wesleyan University.

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