Queens College, B.A. (Philosophy) 1967 Jewish Theological Seminary, 1967 Hebrew University, 1966 Boston University, (Philosophy) 1969 Florida State University, Ph.D. 1975
(Humanities: Religion and Culture), 1975 Dennison University, Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris Causa) (2000) Nazareth College, Doctor of Divinity (Honoris Causa) (1995) Rabbinic Ordination
Michael Berenbaum is the director of the Sigi Ziering Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Ethics at American Jewish University where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies. He is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and the development of historical of films.
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.
After serving as a young academic at Wesleyan University, he received the unique opportunity to join the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1979-80. In 1987, he returned to oversee the development of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, spending a decade as the project director, and later as the first director of its Research Institute. During that time, he kept teaching and publishing at top Beltway universities including Georgetown University, where his class was named by the student newspaper as one of the ten most important courses.
Then he was offered the position of President and Chief Executive Officer of Stephen Spielberg’s The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which entailed taking 50,000 testimonies from 32 countries in 57 languages. Having moved to the West Coast for this position, American Jewish University took advantage of the amazing timing and in 2002, offered him a position on the faculty, both to direct a think tank—the Sigi Ziering Institute—and to teach.
Berenbaum is the author and editor of eighteen books, scores of scholarly articles and hundreds of journalistic pieces.He won the Simon Rockower Memorial Award of the American Jewish Press Association three times in three different categories during a two-year period. 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."
Dr. Berenbaum is also the Executive Editor of the New Encyclopaedia Judaica. The 22 volume, sixteen million work second edition transformed and improved the now classic 1972 work. The EJ was recently awarded the Dartmouth Medal by the American Library Association for the outstanding reference work of 2006.
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. He was the historical consultant on The Shoah Foundation's Documentary, The Last Days, which won an Academy Award for the best feature length documentary of 1998. In 2001, 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.
He was the executive producer, writer and historian for a film entitled Desperate Hours on Turkey and the Holocaust, which was broadcast on PBS. Among he more recent films are About Face on German Jewish Refugees who returned to Germany as Allied Soldiers liberated the camps and served as interrogation and occupation forces as well as advanced intelligence, Swimming in Auschwitz, the story of six Los Angeles based survivors of Auschwitz, and Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust as well as Blessed Be the Match, the story of Hannah Senesch.
Some Books
Report to the President, President's Commission on the Holocaust (Government Printing Office, 1979).
After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (1990).
The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust (1993. Second Ed 2006.)
The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1979. Reprinted as Elie Wiesel: God, The Holocaust, and the Children of Israel (1994).
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994).
A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors (2003).
Witness to the Holocaust (1997).
Co-Editor with J. Shawn Landres, After the Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences (2004.).
Editor, Murder Most Merciful: Essays on the Ethical Conundrum Occasioned by Sigi Ziering’s The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff (2005).
