Professor Simone Schweber

Professional Background

Dr. Simone Schweber received a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University and a B.A. in art history from Swarthmore College. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was the Goodman Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. For her Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship, she conducted research on “Fundamentalist Funnels: Shaping the Holocaust for Religious Consumption.”

Professor Schweber is the author of Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice (Teacher College Press, 2004) which studies teaching and learning about the Holocaust in public high school classrooms. The author of numerous scholarly articles, Professor Schweber has been awarded grants from Stanford University, the Wexner Foundation, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison and directed the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on “Holocaust and Humanity in the 21st Century.”

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Museum, Professor Schweber studied how fundamentalist religious schools teach about the Holocaust and what students in these schools believe. In particular, she compared how the Holocaust is taught in an evangelical Christian School and an ultra orthodox Jewish yeshivah in the United States, examining how each constructs the history of the Holocaust and the role that religion plays in such teachings.

Professor Schweber was in residence at the Mandel Center from January 1 to July 31, 2006.