This morning’s 10:45 lecturer at the Amphitheater will be Michael Berenbaum,
adjunct professor of theology at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
His lecture is titled, “The Structure of Evil: The Men Who Design and
Implement It.”
Berenbaum was co-producer of the short documentary on HBO, “One Survivor
Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story,” which won Academy, Emmy
and Cable Ace awards.
As president and chief executive officer of Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation, Berenbaum was involved in the videotaping of interviews
of Holocaust survivors throughout the world.
He said the tapes now come to about 114,000 hours. “To give you an idea
of how much that is,” he said, “if you sat for 24 hours every
day watching them, it would take you until 2014 to see them all.”
“Holocaust” literally means a burnt offering tendered to God,
Berenbaum explained. In Israel, this term is not used for the events of the
1930s and 1940s, as it is inappropriate. “Israelis call is the ‘Shoah,’
which means whirlwind of destruction,” Berenbaum explained.
Another film project was Berebaum’s position as chief historian for
“Last Days,” an Australian Shoah Foundation movie that won an
Academy Award for best feature length documentary of 1998.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., still takes
some of Berenbaum’s time and attention. From 1988 to 1993 he served
as project director, overseeing the creation of the museum.
There are serious historical questions to be answered there, Berenbaum said.
At present, Berenbaum is involved in several films as chief historian, all
of them pertaining to the Jews during the Hitler era.
Berenbaum’s teaching is usually on Jewish theology, and sometimes 19th
century religious thought. A favorite of his is a course on the Holocaust
in literature. His course at Georgetown was named by the student newspaper
as one of the ten most important courses in the university.
“I’ve been dealing for two decades with some of the most depressing
material in the world,” Berenbaum said. He admitted it is depressing.
“Nobody can deal with it and not pay the price.” But, he said,
we study evil not just to confront it, “but to understand it and see
how it can be tamed.”
To deal with his depressing work, Berenbaum said, “You have to achieve
a balance in life.” He had young children
when he started, and as it happens, he has young children now. “There’s
an irrepressible sense of life in kids,” he said. “That’s
good for me.”
In his lecture this morning, Berenbaum will discuss evil and give some portraits
of significant perpetrators. “I’ll give some interpretation of
their thoughts, value systems, and the justification they gave for their actions.”
He said he would touch on the debate regarding whether these people were ordinary
Germans, or ordinary men. “I’ll add an overlay of Hanna Arendt’s
ideas about the banality of evil,” he said.
Berenbaum has written or edited twelve books, including Anatomy of the Auschwitz
Death Camp, After Tragedy and Triumph and The World Must Know.
Berenbaum will sign copies of his books in the Author’s Alcove outside
the bookstore at 1:15 today.