As of June 9, Shay Pilnik, Ph.D., will be the director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, a department of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Pilnik, 37, was born and raised in Herzliya, Israel, and educated at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, McGill University in Quebec, Canada, and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. His doctorate is in modern Jewish studies.
He currently lives in Oshkosh, where his wife, Orlee Hauser, Ph.D., is tenured professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin campus there. They have two children, Mikhael, 7, and Dina, 2. He has taught at the UW Oshkosh and Milwaukee campuses and at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
Pilnik spoke with Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle editor Leon Cohen by telephone on May 21. Selected and edited excerpts of that conversation follow.
Chronicle: How did you become interested in Jewish studies?
Pilnik: I think for someone who grew up in one of most secular parts of Israel, I came from a family that was more traditional-oriented. My late grandfather was a cantor at the synagogue… And I was very interested in Judaism, although I have to say the Israeli secular educational system gave us a lot of biblical background, and very little background when it came to Jewish law. I was curious about that.
Chronicle: What was it about this subject that so fascinated you?
Pilnik: What fascinated me initially was how little I knew about my own roots. I picked comparative literature because I had a fascination with Russian culture. My parents came from the Soviet Union. After a while I started to realize that my parents came from a unique Jewish cultural center. They were both born in the city of Vilna [capital of Lithuania].
Being the son of Eastern European Jews and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I would say that many different intellectual threads in my life started to coalesce.
Chronicle: How did you end up in Wisconsin?
Pilnik: When I came to McGill University, they had a wonderful international student body program, where a local graduate student would show a recently arrived international one the town, the campus… My buddy was a woman named Orlee whose parents are from Israel, and whose grandma was from Herzliya. And without getting into too many details, in a couple of years she became my wife.
[About eight years ago], she was completing her Ph.D. in sociology and she was offered a position at UW-Oshkosh in the sociology department.
Chronicle: Why did you decide you wanted to apply for the HERC position?
Pilnik: Although I’ve always dreamt about pursuing an academic career… while I was reading the job requirements I realized that actually this is the kind of a position that was tailor-made to someone who has two passions. One is teaching and pursuing serious intellectual challenges, and the second is working with people.
And I realized that [working at HERC] can be an incredible opportunity to take the knowledge that I have accumulated over all these years and offer it to the wider community.
Chronicle: How will you approach your job at HERC?
Pilnik: I think my projected contribution would be to emphasize growth both inwardly and outwardly. Inwardly, inside the community, to raise awareness within the community of what we’re doing; and to connect to and to work together closely with other Jewish organizations within the community…
At the same time, I think we need to grow outwardly. We have wonderful programs that have already been set up… I would say that teaching students, middle school and high school students, about the Holocaust is going to be the primary mission of HERC.
But the outward growth I’m talking about will be expanding it, first of all beyond the Milwaukee area, to cover the entire state of Wisconsin. Second, to maybe deepen our programs. We actually have wonderful programs that teach children many things through the lessons of the Holocaust. I think that we will continue to expand these programs.
Another idea that I had, which I think may be one of the main initiatives I’m bringing to the table, is to offer workshops to organizations and even corporations, and teach them about tolerance and diversity in the workplace… to use the Holocaust as a case in point of where things can turn when an intolerant society is inflamed by bigotry and hatred.
Chronicle: I’ve been to Yad Vashem twice, and both times I’ve come out rigid and shaking with anger. Yet you continually work with this subject…
Pilnik: The Holocaust is a topic, I always tell my students, which is much easier to digest using the brain. It’s harder using the heart…
For years I’ve tried to avoid [the subject], but at the end of the day, I am a grandson of Holocaust survivors. My grandma [who recently turned 90] was a slave when she was a teenager. She was taken away and her parents were murdered in the most vicious way one can imagine. And I grew up very close to her.
I see myself as a representative of the third generation. And I believe that the future after all of Holocaust memory is in power of the young people. I believe that this is a subject too important for me not to pick.
Chronicle: Will your wife still be working in Oshkosh?
Pilnik: She will be commuting to Oshkosh. Her schedule is going to be a little bit more flexible. We are now planning our move to Milwaukee, which will probably take place next spring I would say, or early summer.
Chronicle: Do you have any hobbies?
Pilnik: I love classical music, especially chamber music, liturgical music, operas, and I actually look forward to the commute, Oshkosh to Milwaukee, for the next 12 months. I’m going to listen to a lot of classical music in the car.
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