The Holocaust was a
blot on the record of the
human race.
Genocide
needs to be dealt with like a plague, like cancer.
When I think about what I hope my brothers and I will accomplish
with this gift to the US Holocaust Museum,
it's really a blow for a better world. The path to our future
is an educated population. It's one way
to get more sanity in the world, get more understanding.
That's probably our principal way of making the world a better place,
of trying to improve the world, invest in
people and scholarship.
When you're a world leader in a field, you have international obligations.
One of those obligations is to help young scholars
learn how to use the resources that enable us to tell the story of the
Holocaust
in ways that will resonate with today's young people.
The Mandel Center is not only going to be training
the next generation of Holocaust scholars but every succeeding generation,
ensuring our ability to transmit this history to the future.
My association with the Museum began in 2000 when I was a doctoral student
and working on my dissertation, and now I'm
managing the 30 fellows a year that I was one of
thirteen years ago. Young scholars need a subject that nobody has
studied before, which means they need fresh archival materials.
For every document
that a scholar examines and article or book that they write,
they're telling a truth, they are
recounting a life, they are telling someone's story
who isn't here to tell it anymore. There's a level of engagement with the topic
that you don't find anywhere else. It's very unique.
Every Wednesday when we have our fellows meeting, I think, "That's so interesting!"
I always think my topic is huge, and it is huge,
but when I discuss and exchange experience with other fellows,
this experience and this perspective
gets bigger and bigger. I think about the same issue a lot, actually
because that's one role that all of us have to play,
to make sure the information that's on Facebook,
in published books, in the university classroom, is accurate.
New scholarship is going to reflect in
one mannner or another the
issues with the times in which the scholarship is
produced, and that makes it
powerful material for teaching,
for education. No one can do it quite the way it can be done here
because of the way we combine a community
of young scholars and senior scholars,
archives, books, the physical space and freedom and time to
to do the work that we need to do. It's
absolutely unique, and it's priceless. The assignment that the Museum has
undertaken--
to research, to do research on what happened, to do research on why genocide
continues, and to preach it, to teach it, to teach others to teach it--
that's a mission that should last forever.