USC Shoah Foundation Welcomes Institute Fellow Douglas Greenberg

Former USC Shoah Foundation executive director Douglas Greenberg has begun a two-month residency at USC Shoah Foundation as part of his 2013-2014 Institute Fellowship.

Greenberg, who served as executive director from 2000-2008, is a Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University with teaching and research interests in Holocaust studies, memory and history, comparative genocide, and U.S. colonial history. He served as executive dean of Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences from 2008-2012.

He has also taught at the University of Southern California, Lawrence University and Princeton University, where he served as associate dean of the faculty for four years. Greenberg has also held leadership positions at the Chicago Historical Society, ACLS, the New Jersey Historical Commission and California Council for the Humanities.

As a USC Shoah Foundation Institute Fellow, Greenberg is conducting research for his multimedia scholarly project using survivor testimony from a place that was in six different countries in the twentieth century: the region of Wolyn, which is now in Ukraine.  The project aims to reconstruct the experience of the survivors of the Holocaust who came from a place where 250,000 Jews were murdered before the death camps were completely operational. Relying on about 500 video interviews in the Shoah Foundation archive, Greenberg is attempting to uncover the narrative of the path to mass murder as well as the unusual paths to survival followed by the Jews from Wolyn who escaped the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen and their Ukrainian henchmen.  

The second aim of the project is to explore the memory of the Shoah in Wolyn as expressed by survivors who are only too aware that the prevailing images of the Holocaust do not comprehend the murder of their families and friends.  Their knowledge that the story of the Holocaust in Wolyn has been largely forgotten in public memory influences how they recall and retell the story in their Shoah Foundation interviews.

Greenberg will give a public lecture entitled "Memories of the Forgotten Holocaust: The Jews of Wolyn, 1900-2000” at USC on March 24.