Zachor Event Speaker Biographies
Michael Berenbaum is the Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust and a Professor of Jewish Studies at the American Jewish University in California. The author and editor of 20 books, he was also the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. He was Project Director overseeing the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the first Director of its Research Institute and later served as President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which took the testimony of 52,000 Holocaust Survivors in 32 languages and 57 countries. His work in film has won Emmy Awards and Academy Awards.
Dr. 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.
He is also the Executive Editor of the New Encyclopaedia Judaica. The 22 volume, sixteen million word second edition transformed and improved the now classic 1972 work. The EJ was awarded the Dartmouth Medal by the American Library Association for the outstanding reference work of 2006.
Richard Breitman is the author or co-author of twelve books and many articles in German history, U. S. history, and the Holocaust. His books The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991) and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), were translated into five foreign languages. FDR and the Jews, co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. His latest book, The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within, was published by Public Affairs in late 2019.
Breitman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at American University and is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He received his B.A. from Yale and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. He received the distinguished achievement award for Holocaust studies and research from the Holocaust Educational Foundation in 2018. He lives in the Washington, DC area.
