Expanded Edition of Bestselling Book to be Released at Yeshiva University

Edwin Black, the award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, will release a new expanded edition of his 2001 bestselling book at a special live global streaming event at Yeshiva University’s Furst Hall, 500 West 185th Street, New York City on February 26 at 3 p.m.

The book details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German subsidiaries with the German government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and World War II and how IBM’s technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide against the Jewish people.

The new edition includes some 32 pages of never-before-published internal IBM correspondence, State and Justice Department memos and concentration camp documents that graphically chronicle exactly what IBM did and what they knew during the 12-year Hitler regime. IBM has never denied any of the information in the book and for years has claimed that it has no information about its Hitler-era activities involving the Third Reich.

The event is sponsored by the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and co-sponsored by Yeshiva University’s Office of Pre-Law Advisement, Jacob Hecht Pre-Law Society, Beren and Wilf campuses, in partnership with StandWithUs in association with NAHOS—National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors, Generations of the Shoah International, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the State of California Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights and Tolerance, The Auto Channel, History Network News, The Cutting Edge News, Spero Forum, the Jewish Virtual Library, and many other groups.

At the Live Global Streaming Launch for the IBM and the Holocaust Expanded Edition, Black will take questions for an international audience that has both submitted them in advance or will submit them live during the event. The event can be seen at www.ibmandtheholocaust.com.

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Yeshiva Faculty Lead Alumni on Private Tour of Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit

On February 15, more than 60 Yeshiva University alumni traveled back in time to the shores of the Dead Sea, circa second century BCE.

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The group gathered at Discovery Times Square’s “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times,” a traveling exhibit featuring artifacts from Second Temple-era Jerusalem and the Dead Sea Scrolls sect, for a guided tour led by world Scroll authority and YU Vice Provost Dr. Lawrence Schiffman and noted scholars Dr. Moshe Bernstein and Dr. Joseph Angel, professor of Jewish history and bible and assistant professor of bible, respectively. As alumni peered at reconstructions of ancient Israelite homes and studied royal seals from the Davidic dynasty on jar handles, Schiffman, Bernstein and Angel answered individual questions about the artifacts and shared insight from their own research into the origins and impact of the exhibit’s findings.

Bedouins first discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 inside caves near the Dead Sea bordering what are now Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the tens of thousands of broken pieces of parchment make up some 900 scrolls dating as far back as the third century BCE. YU boasts several of the world’s leading scholars in Dead Sea Scrolls studies, including Schiffman, who has authored nine books and some 150 scholarly articles on the topic.

For Anne Senter ’58S and her daughter-in-law Jodi ’89S, the night offered a unique insider perspective on a critical period of Jewish history. “I like to take my children and my grandchildren out to events like this to learn things together,” said Anne. “Being led by experts who are so close to the sources on this tour was important to us because the Scrolls are so important to our history as a people.”

For Jodi, the faculty was a big part of the night’s drBack aw: “I had Dr. Bernstein for a Tehillim class in Stern and absolutely loved it,” she said.

The tour concluded with a dessert reception, remarks by Schiffman and question-and-answer session with Bernstein and Angel.  As the night wound down, Schiffman contextualized the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the larger frame of Jewish and Israeli history.

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“The finding of these scrolls stimulated an awakening to the wealth and breadth of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period,” said Schiffman. “There is an unbelievable variety in the development of thought at that time, yet we also see the continuity in things like tefillin and sifrei Torah [Torah scrolls], which are still part of our tradition today. We can show these discoveries to our children and to school groups and it really hits home that the Israel we talk about in this period is real.”

For Dr. Bernstein, that continuity is an easily missed but critical lesson of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the differences between Qumran Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism,” said Bernstein. “What we don’t always spend enough time talking about—this is something Schiffman has stressed in a lot of his writing—is the pan-Jewish aspect of so much that we find at Qumran. We spend a lot of time talking about the differences, but if we think about what is the same, such as the notion of saying kedushah with the angels or the interpreting of the bible in certain ways, we really get a much better picture of the things that unified Judaism in the late Second Temple and pre-rabbinic period.”

To learn about upcoming alumni events including the monthly lecture series—featuring a March 20 lecture with Dr. Ari Mirmelstein on “The Pesach Seder and Rabbinic Responses to the Destruction of the Second Temple” —visit www.yu.edu/alumnievents.

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