Michael Nutkiewicz received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA (1978), and has a MA in Philosophy from USC. His areas of interests include Jewish history, political theory, and museum education. He served as the Chief Historian of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (www.vhf.org), Dean of the Cleveland College of Jewish Studies (www.ccjs.edu), Director of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, and taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia. In 1985 he was appointed to the California State Department of Education's Curriculum Review Committee which developed the Model Curriculum for Genocide and Human Rights. In 1987 he was nominated by the German Consulate General to participate in a five-person team for a month-long study tour of how Holocaust is taught in West German high schools and universities. Nutkiewicz was the co-author (with Roman Catholic theologian Michael Downey) of the first national Jewish-Catholic Statement on the Holocaust (At the Edge of Comprehension 1986), prepared for the Respect Life Committee (Archdiocese of Los Angeles and American Jewish Committee). Earlier this year he was a scholar for the White House Presidential Scholars Program where he spoke at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. on education and genocide. This essay emerged from a talk given at a 1996 symposium on The Holocaust in Transformation: German and American Experiences in Remembrance, co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institute of Cincinnati, the University of Cincinnati Hillel Foundation, and the American Jewish Archives.

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Not a Useable Past?
September 19, 1999 Vol.4, no.1