New public scholarship fund honors late historian David Shneer
Eileen and Richard Greenberg created the fund to continue the late scholar’s life’s work
In life, Professor David Shneer strove to spark meaningful conversations among scholars, artists and the public; after his death, his friends, colleagues and supporters aim to continue this work.
, who was the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado Boulder, passed away last fall after a long battle with cancer. He was 48.
Eileen and Richard Greenberg
Elias Sacks, director of the Program in Jewish Studies and associate professor of religious studies, announced recently that donors Eileen and Richard Greenberg had made a significant gift to inaugurate the .
The new fund will support all aspects of Jewish studies public programming, bringing academics and artists to Boulder for lectures, workshops, symposia, performances and other offerings, and “ensuring that the Boulder community of learning is precisely that—a genuine community, in which scholars, performers, students, and members of the public can learn, think and grow together,” Sacks said.
David was passionate about the need for conversations between scholars, artists and members of the public."
“I’m deeply grateful to Eileen and Richard for their generous gift,” he said, noting that they and their family are long-standing supporters of the Program in Jewish Studies, including of the Sondra and Howard Bender Visiting Scholar series, honoring Eileen’s parents.
Eileen is a Boulder alumna, having earned a BA in physical health in 1978, and she and Richard are the parents of three Boulder graduates.
“They were also dear friends of David’s,” Sacks said, adding, “I’m humbled to count them as partners in carrying forward his vision.”
Sacks said Shneer “cared deeply about building community,” making connections between the academy and the broader world, hosting visiting speakers in Jewish studies, organizing symposia with University Libraries, and launching the Archive Transformed artistic residency.
“David was passionate about the need for conversations between scholars, artists and members of the public,” Sacks said. “For David, this relationship-building was more than just one aspect of academic life among others. Rather, it stood at the heart of his vision of what it meant to be a scholar, teacher and activist at a public university in the 21st century.”
Called a “pathbreaking” scholar by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Shneer focused his research on 20th-century European, Russian and Jewish history and culture.
He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 and directed the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver before joining the Boulder faculty in 2008.
While at Boulder, Shneer served as director of Jewish studies, professor of history, and chair of religious studies. He was a distinguished lecturer for the Association for Jewish Studies, faculty director for Yiddishkayt, co-editor in chief of East European Jewish Affairs, and was the inaugural faculty director of Boulder’s Post Holocaust American Judaism Archive.
His book —which won the 2013 Jordan Schnitzer Prize of the Association for Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award—looked at the lives and works of two dozen Soviet Jewish World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front.
His other books include Queer Jews, finalist for the Lambda Literary award; Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora; Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible; and, most recently, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph.
In fall 2011, the traveling museum exhibit “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” debuted at the Art Museum in Boulder and then showed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, the Holocaust Museum Houston, the University of Louisiana’s Museum of Art at the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Chicago.