Alex Grobman

Alex Grobman is an historian with an MA and Ph.D. in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is president of the Institute for Contemporary Jewish Life, a think tank dealing with historical and contemporary issues affecting the Jewish community. He is a contributing editor for Together, a publication of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants. He is a member of the academic board of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and a contributor to the Encyclopedia Judaica and the Partisan website. He reviews books for the Jewish Voice and Opinion.

He is the historical consultant on a documentary about Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut, who took a small Torah into space that had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He appears in the film that is being produced by Tom Hank’s production company, which will be shown on HBO in the next several months.

Dr Grobman appears in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s latest documentary Against the Tide, as an expert on the Vaad Hatzala. He also appears as a scholar in Torah Umesorah’s Sh’eiris Hapleitah: World War II Was Over At Last, and in a film on Jewish profiles of courage produced by Rabbi Yair Hoffman.

Dr. Grobman established the first Holocaust center in the U.S. under the auspices of a Jewish Federation in St. Louis, Missouri and served as its first director. He also served as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angles where he was the founding editor-in chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual, the first serial publication in the United States focusing on the scholarly study of the Holocaust. Dr. Grobman edited Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust, a companion to the Center’s Academy Award winning film Genocide. The book can be found on the Simon Wiesenthal Center website.

Dr. Grobman served as director of the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles where he secured commitments for monetary gifts from newly cultivated major donors, provided academic resources for various religious, educational and social welfare agencies, and was responsible for administering every area of the center’s fiscal and educational activities.

Dr. Grobman is the author of Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of European Jewry, 1944-1948, and editor of In Defense of the Survivors: The Letters and Documents of Oscar A. Mintzer AJDC Legal Advisor, Germany, 1945-46. His book with Michael Shermer, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It? was published by University of California Press in Berkeley in 2000. In 2002, it was published in Italian and in paperback. In 2008, it was published in Greek. In 2009, a second and updated edition was published.

He has also edited fours guides for educators: Anne Frank in Historical Perspective, Those Who Dared: Rescuers and Rescued, a guide to Schindler’s List, anda guide on the Danish rescue of the Jews.“Holocaust Denial: A Global Survey – 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007” were written with Dr. Raphael Medoff. In April 2004, he and Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Professor of Interreligious Studies at the Vatican’s Angelicum University in Rome, wrote an analysis of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ.

His articles have appeared in the U.S, Canada, Israel, Norway and Australia, and on the Internet including the History News Network and American Thinker.

Battling For Souls: The Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee in Post-War Europe was published by KTAV in 2004.

Nations United: How The UN Is Undermining Israel and The U.S. was published in November 2006 by Balfour Books. Parts of the book have been translated into French.

He trains students how to respond to Arab propaganda on American campuses. One student who worked with him for three years became president of Harvard Students For Israel. Another became active at Yale University and is in Yale graduate school this year. Other students are at Yeshiva University, Columbia and NYU .

He has just completed a book on the legitimacy of the state of Israel that will be published in 2010 by Balfour Books.