Ask a simple question of Michael Berenbaum, CMC's newest William F. Podlich Distinguished Visiting Fellow, and a river of ideas flows in your direction. His conversation is quick and easy, even as it focuses on the complexities of bigotry and persecution. The quest for justice is more than a mere abstraction to Berenbaum, who is the former director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and former director of Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. It is, he says, his life's work.

CMC students will have ample opportunity to work with and learn from Berenbaum this spring. He's already presented two public lectures at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, one about his experiences as a not-for-profit leader, and another about his research and teaching. Through mid-April, he'll collaborate with John Roth, the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy, and Jonathan Petropoulos, the John V. Croul Professor of European History, on their Researching the Holocaust course, and he'll visit classes across campus-in film studies, leadership, management, philosophy, economics, and more.

Berenbaum will also help Roth and Petropoulos plan a major Holocaust conference scheduled for the 2003-2004 academic year, and work with them on plans for a proposed new research institute focusing on the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights. In between, the visiting scholar will continue as a consultant on the development of museums and historical films through his roles as president of The Berenbaum Group in Los Angeles, director of the Sigi Ziering Institute for the Study of the Ethical Implications of the Holocaust, and adjunct professor of theology at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

This teacher-scholar-historian-entrepreneur-filmmaker-writer-management consultant is used to donning a variety of highly regarded hats. Berenbaum, also a rabbi, earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Queens College, then attended the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew University, and Boston University before earning his doctorate in religion and culture from Florida State University. He has taught a variety of subjects-modern Jewish theology, the Holocaust, literature and theology, ethics, sociology and psychology of religion, Jewish history, and rabbinics-at a number of institutions including Georgetown University, American University, the University of Maryland, and George Washington and Wesleyan universities.

"I've always remained a teacher. A lot of the time, my work means going in somewhere, making a presentation, and leaving. It can seem like a series of one-night stands," he said. "But teaching is a sustained relationship. And CMC is a special place. There's a great deal of interaction with the students, who are the kings and queens, the princes and princesses of the institution. They're truly cherished."

Berenbaum and Steve Spielberg, director and founding chairman of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.