Since last September, Simone Schweber has been the director of the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She replaced Michael Bernard–Donals (see August 2012 Chronicle) who has become UW vice-provost.
Schweber was born in Lexington, Mass., the daughter of a geneticist mother and a professor of physics father, and was raised in what she described as “a very dedicated Jewish home.” She earned her Ph.D. at the Stanford University School of Education, specializing in Holocaust education.
She is the author of “Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice” (2004) and co-author with Debbie Findling of “Teaching the Holocaust” (2007). She has been a member of the UW-Madison faculty since 1999 as Goodman Professor of Education and Jewish Studies. She received the Madison Jewish Community Council’s Miriam Singer Sulman Young Leadership Award in 2005.
She had a telephone conversation with Chronicle editor Leon Cohen on March 16. Selected and edited excerpts of that conversation follow:
Cohen: I see you initially majored in art history. How did it happen that you got into the field you are in?
Schweber: When I was in [Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania], I taught Hebrew school at a Reconstructionist synagogue outside of Philadelphia. That job introduced me to a really different way of being Jewish and also introduced me to teaching. I became interested in education through that position, but I thought then that I would go on in art history.
I ended up in the San Francisco Bay area of northern California and had a bunch of different jobs in the Jewish community… teaching at four or five different congregations over a period of 10 years. Eventually, I ended up working at the Holocaust Center of Northern California [now the Tauber Holocaust Library and Education Program].
My job there involved taking Holocaust survivors to the schools. As I visited more schools… the more interested I became in what kids learned before we came to visit.
Ultimately, that’s what propelled me into learning about Holocaust education and trying to fit it within both a Jewish framework — how Jewish students ought to learn about the Holocaust — but also within a broader framework of what is it the Holocaust teaches us about Jews and what it teaches us writ large.
Cohen: I have been to Yad Vashem [Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum] twice and both times came out rigid with anger… How can you keep working with this subject?
Schweber: I really believe strongly that the things that bring up deep reactions emotionally are opportunities to pause and consider what we can learn about ourselves and about each other. Precisely those experiences that make us angry or resentful or depressed are the things we want to try to pause and examine and turn around and really think hard about…
I’ve done research with ultra-Orthodox Jews, charismatic fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, elementary school kids and high school kids, and I think whenever you’re talking about atrocities and genocide you’re really talking about the violence we do to each other in both large and small ways.
There are lots of different interpretations of this history and they tell us about how we interact with each other all the time. To me, that’s what makes learning about genocide a really powerful way to combat racism, to combat anti-Semitism, to combat the ways in which we limit each other’s possibilities.
Cohen: What do you do now as director of the overall Jewish studies program at UW-Madison?
Schweber: Since becoming director, I have to admit I’ve had a lot to learn, because being a faculty person and being director of a center are radically different things — in terms of UW system processes and how the university works and who to talk to for what, and things you can and can’t do — it’s pretty complex, and it’s also very rewarding. I love the people I’m meeting in this new role.
Cohen: Do you have a vision for where you want the center to go?
Schweber: We have a really robust center right now in terms of our faculty, our student offerings and our outreach to the community. Our faculty members are amazing, teaching people locally, nationally and internationally. I want to see that work continue despite what I fear are going to be very large [budget] cuts.
In order to maintain that level of excellence, we’re going to need to do some more fundraising, which is also what I’m in the process of learning how to do.
I believe strongly that what we do is not only to provide education for Jewish students on campus but to provide education about Jews to non-Jewish students. As a center for Jewish studies, we illuminate not only Jewish history, but ways of thinking about cultural traditions that both are and aren’t peculiar to Jews.
Cohen: There’s been a lot of news lately about anti-Israel activity shading into anti-Semitic activity on U.S. academic campuses. Are you seeing any of this in Madison?
Schweber: If you are asking if on campus there’s increased anti-Semitism, I would say I don’t see that at the moment. That said, I think there’s a lot of complexity around Israeli politics and that the university has to remain a place where young people investigate ideas in a safe environment and an intellectually challenging way.
Part of our educational mission is to try to teach our students about what the distinction is between anti-Semitic activity and challenging questioning.
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