Lawrence Baron

Lawrence Baron has held the Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University since 1988 and directed its Jewish Studies Program until 2006. He received his Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with George L. Mosse.  He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He has authored four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005). He served as the historian and an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe.  In 2006 he delivered the keynote address for Yad Vashem’s first conference devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust.  His contribution to Holocaust Studies was recently profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge: 2010) by Paul Bartrop and  Steven Jacobs. He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association.