Teaching the Holocaust Speakers – Dr. Michael Berenbaum

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia 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. The EJ won the prestigious Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association for the Outstanding Reference Work of 2006. He also was a contributing editor to the Encyclopedia of Genocide.

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 twenty-four 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 books include: Remembering for the Future: Auschwitz, Armenia and Beyond, Auschwitz and 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. Johns Hopkins University Press

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. In December 2012 it was named by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry as a work of enduring importance to American culture. He was the historical consultant on The Shoah Foundation’s Documentary, The Last Days that won an Academy Award for the best feature-length documentary of 1998.

Over the past several years, 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.
• About Face, a film on German Jewish refugees who fought for the Allies During World War II.
• Swimming in Auschwitz, the story of six women survivors of Auschwitz that was broadcast on PBS.
• After Auschwitz: Six Women’s Stories, recounting their post Holocaust life in Los Angeles.
• Treblinka’s Last Witness, the story of Samuel Willenberg, broadcast nationally on PBS.
• One Day in the Life of Auschwitz: The Kitty Hart-Moxon Story, Discovery Channel, January 27, 2015.
• Anne Frank’s Holocaust, National Geographic, April 2015.
• Not A23029, May 2016.
• Annihilation: The Destruction of the European Jews, an eight-part series by Smithsonian, 2016.
• Daring to Rescue, August 2016.
• Historical Consultant, The Zookeepers Wife, April 2017.
• Hidden, 2017.
• Interviewee, Antisemitism, 2017.
• Operation Finale, 2018.
• Producer, The Call to Remember: The David Schaechter Story Regional Emmy Award
• Executive Producer, They Fought Back: Resistance
  

Berenbaum was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center that opened in Skokie, and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He was the conceptual developer on the Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City and a historian to the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. He developed the Memorial Museum to Macedonia Jewry in Skopje and the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum and the Cincinnati Holocaust and Human Rights Center and films for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. He now working on museums in Warsaw and Bucharest. His is co-curator of the award-winning special exhibition: Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away now in Boston, which has been touring the world with stops in Madrid, Spain, Malmo Sweden, New York, Kansas City and at the Ronald Regan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and after a six month run in Boston, it is now in Toronto.

For his work in journalism, 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 has been featured on Nightline  and the Today Show as well as National Public Television. PBS, CNN and Fox News.