Published Books

THE WORLD MUST KNOW: THE STORY OF THE HOLOCAUST AS TOLD IN THE UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

  • The World Must Know depicts the evolution of the Holocaust comprehensively, as it is presented in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

    The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.D., honors the six-million Jews and millions of other victims of the Nazis during World War II―a memorial to the past and a living reminder of the moral obligations of societies and individuals. The World Must Know documents the compelling human stories of the Holocaust as told in the Museum's renowned Permanent Exhibition. This second edition is based on the substantive increase in knowledge of the Holocaust over the past dozen years and information from archives that had been inaccessible to researchers until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes of Easten and Central Europe.

    This revised edition is enhanced with new insights and updates based on archival information that had been inaccessible to researchers until after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe. It includes new photographs, redrawn charts, a new section on the Holocaust in Greece, an updated bibliography, and a new foreword by the museum director.

    "The World Must Know by Michael Berenbaum is a skillfully organized and clearly told account of the German Holocaust that consumed, with unparalleled malevolence, six million Jews and millions of innocent others―Protestants, Catholics, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, the handicapped, and so many others, adults and children. This important book, a vital guide through the unique corridors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., merits the widest of audiences." ―Chaim Potok, author of The Chosen and The Promise

    Published on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Encyclopedia Judaica

  • The Encyclopaedia Judaica is a 22-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, holidays, language, scripture, and religious teachings. As of 2010, it had been published in two editions accompanied by a few revisions.

    The English-language Judaica was also published on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM version has been enhanced by at least 100,000 hyperlinks and several other features, including videos, slide shows, maps, music and Hebrew pronunciations. While the CD-ROM version is still available, the publisher has discontinued it.[1]

    The encyclopedia was written by Israeli, American and European professional subject specialists.

Murder most merciful: essays on the conundrum occasioned by sigi Ziering’s the judgement of herbert bierhoff

  • Murder Most Merciful is a collection of insightful essays that consider Sigi Ziering's play, The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff. In the play, Ziering tells the story of a loving father and his decision during the Holocaust to take the life of his beloved daughter to avoid her deportation. Scholars who have thought long and hard about the ethical implications of the Holocaust continue to grapple with the poignant questions Ziering raised.

    Commentary from the book's diverse contributors, including Holocaust survivors, scholars, rabbis, philosophers, and historians, results in an insightful and provocative moral and theological exchange. Murder Most Merciful will stimulate further debate on the crucial issues of martyrdom, euthanasia, and the guilt of the innocent. Ultimately, the judgment of Herbert Bierhoff is for the reader to make. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 28.

Published: January 6, 2006

Published: January 6, 2006

After the passion is gone

  • Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ topped box office charts and changed the American religious conversation. The controversies it raised remain unsettled. In After The Passion Is Gone: American Religious Consequences, leading scholars of religion and theology ask what Gibson's film and the resulting controversy reveal about Christians, Jews, and the possibilities of interreligious dialogue in the United States. Landres and Berenbaum's collection moves beyond questions of whether or not the film was faithful to the gospels, too violent, or antisemitic and explores why the debate focused on these issues but not others. The public discussion of The Passion shed light on a wide range of American attitudes―evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish―about media and faith, politics and history, Jesus and Judaism, fundamentalism and victimhood. After The Passion Is Gone takes a unique view of vital points in Christian-Jewish relations and contemporary American religion.

Published: November 15, 2004

A Promise to remember : the HOLOCAUST in the words and voices of its survivors

  • A chronicle of the Holocaust based on the personal accounts of survivors ranges from the rise of the Nazis to the death camps and final liberation, accompanied by removable documents and a spoken-word audio CD.

Murder most merciful: essays on the conundrum occasioned by sigi Ziering’s the judgement of herbert bierhoff

  • Murder Most Merciful is a collection of insightful essays that consider Sigi Ziering's play, The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff. In the play, Ziering tells the story of a loving father and his decision during the Holocaust to take the life of his beloved daughter to avoid her deportation. Scholars who have thought long and hard about the ethical implications of the Holocaust continue to grapple with the poignant questions Ziering raised.

    Commentary from the book's diverse contributors, including Holocaust survivors, scholars, rabbis, philosophers, and historians, results in an insightful and provocative moral and theological exchange. Murder Most Merciful will stimulate further debate on the crucial issues of martyrdom, euthanasia, and the guilt of the innocent. Ultimately, the judgment of Herbert Bierhoff is for the reader to make. The book appears in the Studies in the Shoah series as volume 28.

Published: January 6, 2006

The Holocaust and History: the known, the unknown, the disputed and the reexamined

  • This volume presents the results of nearly fifty years of scholarship on the Holocaust by the world's most eminent researchers. Approaching the Shoah from diverse points of view, historians and sociologists, political scientists and theologians, literary scholars and psychologists disclose the insights yielded by their investigations. Growing out of the inaugural conference of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute, the book defines the state of knowledge about the Holocaust a half century after the event.

Published: July 1, 1998

WITNESS TO THE HOLOCAUST

  • 50 years after the liberation of the death camps in Nazi Germany, the former project director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and current director of its Research Institute, compiles a fascinating collection of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust.

    From the first boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany in 1933 to testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, this illustrated volume includes survivor testimonies, letters, government documents, newspaper reports, diary entries and other firsthand materials, as well as Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum's insightful commentary putting the materials into context. The book's chronologically organized documentary approach provides a unique perspective on this much-published subject, and drawing on the most current research in the field of Holocaust studies, offers readers an unforgettable and engrossing history of the Nazis' largely successful effort to eradicate the Jews and other "undesirables" of Europe.

Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp

  • Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, is probably the most comprehensive volume on Auschwitz in print. Essays by leading scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States document the history of the camp, the technology and magnitude of the genocide that occurred there, profiles of the inmates and the Nazis who ran the camp (such as Joseph Mengele), the underground resistance that arose, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when. It's not a book to read straight through because of the sheer volume of information (more than 600 pages of text) and the horror of its contents. But it's the best resource for answering a wide variety of questions about the camp, especially those raised by the many excellent memoirs by the survivors. --Michael Joseph Gross

Published: April 22, 1998

Published: April 3, 1997

The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust

  • Coinciding with the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April, this volume commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, using photographs of the museum's artifacts to document the human stories. Simultaneous. 60,000 first printing. $60,000 ad/promo.

Published: July 1, 1998

Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis

After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience

Published: 1990

Published: 1990

Holocaust Religious and Philosophical Implications

Published: 1989

Report to the President, President's Commission on the Holocaust

Published: 1979

Published: 1985

The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Eli Wiesel (Middletown

Published: 1987

Published: December 30, 2006

Published: October 2, 2003

From Holocaust to new life

  • Beginning with two general essays,the book explores Nazi slave labor policies, and Nazi policies in the occupied territories. The remaining chapters examine Nazi treatment of Gypsies, Russian POW's, homosexuals, Catholic activists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and pacifists as well as Nazi medical experimentation policies.

  • The story of American Jewry is inextricably entwined with the awesome defeat of the Holocaust and the rebirth of the state of Israel. However, for Michael Berenbaum, and others of his generation, whose adult consciousness included the war in Lebanon and the Palestinian Uprisings, the tale is more anguished, for the Jewish People are now divided, uncertain about the implications of the past and the direction of their future. Berenbaum explores the Jewish identity of this generation, the first to mature after tragedy and triumph. He probes the Holocaust's impact on Jewish consciousness and the imprint of American culture on Jewish identity. Challenging Zionism's conventional assumptions, he details American Jews' changing relationship to Israel as he examines the tensions created within Jewish tradition between a history of victimization and the empowerment of Jews. While demonstrating that the security of victory is one step from the anguish of victims, even when the victors have recently emerged from the fire, Berenbaum holds out the hope of liberation for Judaism, maintaining that five thousand years of history, with its chapter of Holocaust and empowerment, provide a unique foundation upon which to build a future. Michael Berenbaum is Hymen Goldman Professor of Theology at Georgetown University and Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Vision of the Void: Theological Reflections on the Works of Elie Wiesel and The Holocaust: Religious and Political Implications (with John Roth).

  • Analyzes the Jewish theology in the fiction and other writings of Elie Wiesel and discusses his treatment of the Holocaust.

  • Book by Roth, John K., Berenbaum, Michael