Lawrence Baron
Lawrence Baron has held the Abraham Nasatir Chair in Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University since 1988. He received his PhD in Modern European History from the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 1974 and taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He currently serves as the advisor to the Graduate Program in History at San Diego State University and directed the university's Jewish Studies program from l988 until 2006. Specializing in modern German and Jewish history, he authored Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (2005) and acted as the historian for Sam and Pearl Oliner's The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988). He has spoken about his research at Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Imperial War Museum in London. He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association and a member of the Advisory Board of the Association for Jewish Studies. His most recent article "Picturing Prejudice in Hollywood's First Films about Anti-Semitism" appeared in Studies in Jewish Civilization, Volume 17 (2007).