Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum answers “What does it mean to be Jewish?” in our latest #0dot2 video.
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.
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, 16 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.
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 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 20 books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces.
He is a graduate of Queens College (BA, 1967) and Florida State University (Ph.D.., 1975), and also attended The Hebrew University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Boston University. He has won numerous fellowships including the Danforth Fellowship, the George Wise Fellowship at Tel Aviv University, and the Charles E. Merrill Fellowship at FSU. Berenbaum was an elected fellow of the Society for Values in Higher Education. He was given a Doctor of Divinity (honoris causa) from Nazareth College in 1995 and a Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa) from Denison University.
B’nai B’rith International has launched the Zero.Dot.Two Initiative (#0dot2) as a part of its 175th anniversary to discuss ideas around Jewish identity, to educate social media users about Judaism as a proactive way to combat anti-Semitism and to promote the Jewish connection to the State of Israel through the voices of many online influencers. With approximately 14.4 million Jewish individuals alive today, we represent approximately 0.2 percent of global citizens.
To learn more about this project and hear voices from other Jewish influencers, please visit: http://bit.ly/2pZ3qov.
