I am an historian and the special assistant to the director of education in the National Institute for Holocaust Education of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Formerly, I was the historian in the museum's photo archives and special assistant to the director of the Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Since graduating from Macalester, I have received a master’s in Religious Studies from Vanderbilt University. I completed my thesis while a student at the Universitaet Goettingen in Germany, where I lived and studied for three and a half years. I have also received a Ph.D. in Jewish History from the School for Graduate Studies of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Cincinnati).

While researching my dissertation on the social welfare work of the German Jews during the Third Reich, I was an Inter-university Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a year of research at Yad Vashem, The National Library, and the Central Zionist Archives. For the three years prior to moving to Washington, I taught Jewish Studies at the University of Kentucky at the Main Campus in Lexington (Go, Wildcats!) and at the University of Cincinnati.

I am beginning my ninth year at the museum and as a proud member of the Federal bureaucracy. Presently, I am part of the team that is developing the museum's educational and interpretive programs in support of its next major special exhibit, which will be on propaganda. I also serve as an historian and Instructor for the museum's professional training programs for local, state, and international police forces, FBI serving and New Agents, State Department Foreign Service Officers, and my very favorites, the West Point cadet corps and the US Naval Academy plebes and midshipmen.

Professional commitments will not allow me to get away from Washington to attend the reunion. As I write this [early May 2007], I am just about to convene a week-long seminar I co-organized with the United Nations Department of Public Information Advocacy Unit for the UN's National Information Officers (IOs) from the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of the seminar is to prepare the Information Officers to interpret and plan educational programming in their home countries in response to the UN's recent resolutions on Holocaust remembrance and on genocide prevention. Parallel programs are being held at Yad Vashem in Israel for the Anglophone Asian and Africa IOs, and at the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine in Paris for the IOs from Francophone Asian and African countries. Throughout the planning for this seminar, Macalester — where the UN flag flew over us each day — has never been far from my mind. I wish I could join you all around that flagpole for the Reunion out there in God's Country — “ja, sure, you betcha.” Breathe in a big lungful of prairie air for me.

My Mac Memories: Working with my fellow drama majors in rehearsals and our long, passionate, and "oh-so-sophisticated" conversations in the Green Room; laughing with Professor Harvey Paul Jurick in the costume shop; and also, pursuing my "second major" — playing bridge — in the dank basement of the Union.