Menachem Z. Rosensaft - Academic Career

Academic Career

Menachem Rosensaft received his B.A. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1971, together with an M.A. degree in creative writing from the university's Writing Seminars. From 1972 until 1975, he was an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Jewish Studies at the City College of the City University of New York and assisted Professor Elie Wiesel in his courses on Holocaust literature and Hasidism. He received a second M.A. degree in modern European history from Columbia University in 1975, and in 1979, he received his J.D. degree from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Book Review Editor of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law.

After clerking for two years for Whitman Knapp, United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York, he spent fourteen years as an international and securities litigator at several major New York law firms and at an international bank. He is multilingual, has broad experience in European, Middle Eastern, and South American legal, commercial, and political issues, and has conducted sensitive negotiations with senior government officials at both national and municipal levels.

In 1995, he became Senior International Counsel for The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, and from 1996 to 2000 was Executive Vice President of the Jewish Renaissance Foundation, Inc. As a foundation executive, he was responsible for the development, coordination and funding of educational and cultural projects in Eastern and Central Europe, including the acquisition and restoration of landmark buildings for use as a Jewish cultural center in Warsaw, Poland, and developing innovative educational programs for Russian-Jewish immigrants to Germany. In 1999, he was honored by the Mayor of Warsaw for "inspiring work in city planning and preservation of historical monuments".

From September 2000 until December 2003 Rosensaft was a partner in the New York office of a national law firm, representing, among other clients, the Audit Committee and independent Directors of a New York Stock Exchange listed company in connection with an internal investigation of accounting irregularities, a related proceeding brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and class action litigation. In January 2004 he joined a financial services firm in New York City as Special Counsel, becoming its General Counsel in May 2005. He played a key role in guiding the firm through a period of intense regulatory and governmental scrutiny and implementing good governance practices.

He was appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and reappointed to a second five-year term in 1999, chairing its Content Committee from 1994 to 2000, its Collections and Acquisitions Committee from 1996 to 2000, and its Committee on Governance from 2000 to 2002. He was a member of the Council’s Executive Committee from 1996 until 2003. He is the editor of Life Reborn, Jewish Displaced Persons 1945-1951, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2001. In September 2010, President Obama appointed Rosensaft to a third term on the US Holocaust Memorial Council.

He has been a Trustee of the Park Avenue Synagogue since 1994, and he was elected President of the Synagogue in 2003. He is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, a joint publishing endeavor with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, Vice President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Moment Magazine. He is also a former Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Section of the World Jewish Congress. He was one of 45 prominent American Jews who discussed the significance of fatherhood within the context of their Jewish identity in the 2004 book, Jewish Fathers: A Legacy of Love. He received the 2003 Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Award of Israel Bonds, and was awarded the 2006 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Feature Writing of the American Jewish Press Association for his Foreword to “Great Love Stories of the Holocaust,” published in the June 2005 issue of Moment. In November 2011, he received the Distinguished Humanitarian Award from the Jewish Faculty & Staff Association of New York City College of Technology. He has published articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, Moment, The New York Law Journal, the National Law Journal, the New York Jewish Week, the Forward, the Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz, the JTA News Bulletin, and other newspapers and professional journals. He is married to Jean Bloch Rosensaft, also the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who is Senior National Director for Public Affairs and Institutional Planning at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and director of its New York museum. He is the co-author, with their daughter, Joana D. Rosensaft, of “The Early History of German-Jewish Reparations,” published in the Fordham International Law Journal.

In September 1981, he was one of the founders of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and was elected the organization’s first Chairman. Since June 1984, he has had the title of Founding Chairman. Under his leadership, the International Network organized major conferences of children of survivors in New York in 1984 and Los Angeles in 1987, and in 1982, it held the first city-wide rally in New York City on behalf of Ethiopian Jewry. Rosensaft also participated in the planning of and programming for the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem in June 1981, and the mass gatherings of thousands of Holocaust survivors in Washington, D.C. (1983), Philadelphia (1985), and New York (1986).

Rosensaft’s philosophy of Holocaust remembrance is greatly influenced by what he has described as Elie Wiesel’s “commitment to human rights, his readiness to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to contemporary issues while at all times emphasizing its Jewish particularity.” Thus, his focus has consistently been on social and political action rather than psychological introspection. In his opening address at the first international conference of children of Holocaust survivors in New York in May 1984, he noted that human rights abuses alongside the persistence of anti-Semitism “serve to remind us that Jews are never the only victims of the world’s evil and venality.” Pointing out that “we are even confronted by the terrifying phenomenon of Jewish would-be terrorists on the West Bank who strive to implement the racist philosophy expounded by fanatics such as Meir Kahane,” the American-born member of the Israeli parliament who promoted a virulently anti-Arab policies, he concluded that “it is not enough for us only to commemorate the past. Rather we must be sensitive to all forms of human suffering, and we must take our place at the forefront of the struggle against racial hatred and oppression of any kind.”

Twenty-one years later, on April 17, 2005, he reiterated these views in a speech at Bergen-Belsen on the 60th anniversary of its liberation. The children and grandchildren of the survivors, he declared:

In the spring of 1985, Rosensaft was an outspoken critic of President Ronald Reagan’s decision to pay homage to fallen German World War II soldiers, including members of Hitler’s Waffen SS, at the military cemetery at Bitburg during a state visit to Germany. Addressing some 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their families in Philadelphia on April 21, 1985, Rosensaft said, “For heaven’s sake, let him find another cemetery. There must be at least one in all of Germany that does not contain SS men.” On May 5, 1985, Rosensaft organized and led a demonstration of survivors and children of survivors at Bergen-Belsen in protest against the visits that day by President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the mass-graves of Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel wrote in his memoirs that Rosensaft was “one of the very few to strongly oppose President Reagan in the Bitburg affair.”

In April 1987, Rosensaft played a key role in convincing the government of Panama not to give sanctuary to Nazi war criminal Karl Linnas, and in ensuring Linnas’ deportation from the United States to the Soviet Union. He also “publicly criticized the German government for failing to provide Holocaust survivors with adequate medical coverage while paying generous pensions to veterans of the Waffen SS,” and he has challenged the multi-million dollar fee application submitted by the court-appointed lead settlement counsel in a Holocaust-based class action brought against Swiss banks in the name of survivors.

Rosensaft, who was known to be a supporter of the Israeli peace movement, was elected National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance in early 1988. Shortly thereafter, he confronted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Shamir had called on the American Jewish leadership to support his government’s hard-line policies and criticized those who publicly espoused more dovish positions. Rosensaft responded by noting that since Israelis themselves were divided, “Why should we be accused of disloyalty?” “We support Israel fully and identify with her totally,” he explained, referring to the more liberal Jewish groups that belonged to the Presidents Conference. “But that does not mean we have to agree with every single decision or policy set by the government or a particular minister. Voicing our concerns does not indicate disloyalty.”

In December 1988, he was one of five American Jews who met in Stockholm, Sweden, with Yasir Arafat and other senior leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, resulting in the PLO’s first public recognition of Israel. Writing in Newsweek, he explained that despite an initial reluctance to participate in such a meeting, he concluded that since he had urged others to negotiate with the PLO, “I really had no choice. Since I wanted others to talk to the enemy, I had to be willing to do so as well – not going would be a betrayal of my principles both as a Jew and as a Zionist.” For Rosensaft, the very beginning of dialogue was a major accomplishment. “There are miles to go,” he said. “But for God’s sake, let’s start talking. When you talk, you de-demonize the enemy.”

A year later, in an open letter to Arafat also published in Newsweek, he voiced his dismay at the fact that the Palestinian leader had done nothing to move the peace process forward since the Stockholm meeting. “I knew, of course,” he wrote, “that you had not overnight turned into Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer. Still, you have regrettably failed to take any substantive steps to persuade the Israeli public that their destruction has ceased to be the PLO’s ultimate objective. . . . If you truly want peace, and I hope you do, you and your colleagues must do far more than you have done to date to demonstrate the sincerity of your intentions. You must renounce terrorism in fact, not merely in rhetoric.”

In October 2000, Rosensaft expressed his utter disillusionment with Arafat. “We believed him,” Rosensaft wrote in the Washington Post, "when he said that he and the PLO were committed to a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believed him when he proclaimed an end to terrorism. We were wrong. . . . Of course the Palestinians were entitled to self-determination – even independence—but only on terms of mutual respect. The Palestinians’ claims of nationhood could not stand separate and apart from their acknowledgment that Israelis are entitled to precisely the same rights. Arafat and his colleagues gave lip service to these lofty sentiments. We believed them. We were wrong. . . . Perhaps, in time, the Palestinians will realize that a different leader will better serve them and their cause. Perhaps they will realize that stabbing and stomping Israeli soldiers to death and then parading their mutilated bodies in an obscene triumph is not acceptable behavior in the 21st century. Perhaps. But then, we also believe in the eventual arrival of the Messiah. In the meantime, those of us who wanted so desperately to see Arafat as a positive, constructive presence of any kind must reiterate over and over again: We were wrong.”

In the winter of 2002, Rosensaft sharply attacked the Jewish Museum in New York for trivializing the Holocaust in its exhibition, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” by including a display of six lifelike busts of the notorious Auschwitz SS doctor Josef Mengele and such works as “Prada Deathcamp” and the “Giftgas Giftset” of poison gas canisters packaged with Chanel, Hermes and Tiffany& Co. logos. “For a Holocaust survivor to hear that a bust of Mengele is on display at the Jewish Museum will at the least cause nightmares,” Rosensaft told Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post. “It’s the functional equivalent of painting pornography on Torah scrolls and exhibiting it as art. It may well be art. But it is also offensive to many, many people. . . . The intellectual reasons of displaying deliberately provocative art have to give way to the far more real pain that this is going to cause for thousands of Holocaust survivors who are still alive.”

Rosensaft has also struggled with the theological implications of the Holocaust. “Where was God when the fires of Auschwitz failed to ignite the universe,” he asked at a 1995 commemoration at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As reported in the New York Times, he “posed the question of how God could be praised if he did not stop the killing. Then he suggested an answer: ‘What if God was not with the killers, with the forces that inflicted Auschwitz on humanity?’” He explained that, “To me, the incredible element of the Holocaust is not the behavior of the murderers, because that is pure evil. It is the behavior of the victims and how they remained human and in many ways behaved in a superhuman manner. . . . So the God I choose to pray to was at Auschwitz, but it was not in the manner of the victims’ deaths, it was in the way in which they lived.” Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City, Rosensaft elaborated on his belief that evil is perpetrated by human beings, not by God:

In 2009, he called on the Pope to publicly condemn controversial bishop Richard Williamson, a member of the Society of Saint Pius X and a noted Holocaust denier. He has also written that Mitt Romney's faith should not be an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign.

In 2012, he denounced immigration restrictionists Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan as racists who should be shunned from mainstream political debate.

In a June 4, 2012, Huffington Post article in which he defended President Obama’s reference to “a Polish death camp” at a Presidential Medal of Freedom presentation as “an innocent phraseological error,” Rosensaft, citing a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote that “thousands of Polish political, religious and intellectual leaders were also killed by the Germans during World War II” alongside millions of Jews, and that “Between 70,000 and 75,000 non-Jewish Poles are estimated to have perished at Auschwitz alone.” In the same Huffington Post article, Rosensaft pointed out that Polish government officials “have a valid historiographical point” in insisting that German annihilation and concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka not be referred to as “Polish death camps,” and he noted that in 2006, he had “publicly supported the Polish Government's request that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization formally change the name of the site of the most notorious of the World War II camps on UNESCO's World Heritage List from ‘Auschwitz Death Camp’ to ‘former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp.’”