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This year, LBI awarded Leo Baeck Medals to Shulamit and Jehuda Reinharz. LBI President David G. Marwell presented the medals on October 15, 2024 at the Institute’s Annual Dinner at the Center for Jewish History in New York.
In his introduction, Executive Director Markus Krah expressed gratitude for the LBI community during an existential year. “The Leo Baeck Institute has always understood itself as a big tent which has room for a broad range of opinions,” he said. “What brings us together tonight is a shared commitment to preserve the history of German-speaking Jews and to show its relevance for today.”
Thomas L. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime friend of the Reinharzes, gave a jocular laudatio, tracing ways the threads of his own life braided with those of the Reinharzes. Friedman met Jehuda Reinharz while a student at Brandeis, where the historian later served as president until assuming leadership of the Cleveland-based Mandel Foundation in 2011.
Friedman related stories about both Jehuda and Shulamit breaking boundaries. Jehuda, born in Haifa and raised in Germany, gave a hint of his calling as a historian when he arranged an assembly for his high-school in Essen to refute a teacher’s inaccurate statements about the Holocaust. Shulamit pioneered the field of Jewish womens’ studies at Brandeis and elsewhere. Friedman also joked affectionately about the couple, saying “from the first time I met Shula at Brandeis, it was clear to me that Jehuda was really Mr. Shula Reinharz.”
Jehuda Reinharz reflected on the role LBI had played in his career with an anecdote about witnessing a vehement disagreement over the history of Zionism between Gershom Scholem and Robert Weltsch, two founding members of the Institute. Shulamit discussed how German language and culture had been a continuous thread in her own transnational family history otherwise marked by profound dislocations.
Jehuda and Shulamit Reinharz
Jehuda Reinharz has been an intellectual and communal leader, speaking to academic and broader audiences. His work and life connect places and topics that are central to 20th-century Jewish history and the mission of the LBI. Jehuda was born in Israel, grew up in West Germany, and was trained in the United States. He has academic degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia University, and Brandeis University, which he led as president from 1994–2010. He is the author of countless books and articles and the recipient of many prizes, among them the President of Israel prize awarded by the Knesset. A former trustee of the LBI, he has since 2011 been the president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation.
Shulamit Reinharz was born in Amsterdam to German-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She received academic degrees from Barnard College and Brandeis University. After teaching at the University of Michigan, she returned to Brandeis where, as a member of the sociology department she established the field of Jewish Women’s Studies by creating several academic centers, a gallery of feminist art, and the Israeli-American academic journal, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish and Gender Studies. The most recent of her 16 books is Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (2024). For the past eight years, Shulamit has worked with the current residents of Gunzenhausen, Germany and a parallel number of Jewish descendants of survivors from the town on projects called “Jüdisches Leben in Gunzenhausen.”
Thomas L. Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman, an internationally known author and journalist, has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at The New York Times. His foreign affairs column in The New York Times reports on US domestic politics and foreign policy, Middle East conflicts, international economics, environment, biodiversity and energy.
For his coverage of the Middle East, Mr. Friedman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and 1988 for international reporting. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary for “his clarity of vision…in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.” In 2004, he was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement and the honorary title, Order of the British Empire (OBE), by Queen Elizabeth II.
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