Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor of Professor of East European Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, and Yiddish at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, will speak about “A Tale of Two Diaries from the Lodz Ghetto,” on Tuesday, October 30 at 1:45 p.m. in the Trustees Pavilion (PAV1) at Ramapo College of New Jersey. The lecture will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

Dr. Shapiro will compare and contrast the diary of a teenaged contemporary of Anna Frank with that of a cynical, well educated, middle-aged husband and father who manages to survive together with his wife and daughter from the arrival of the Germans until the arrival of Soviet troops who find barely 800 surviving Jews from a prewar Jewish community of almost a quarter million.

Born in Germany to Polish-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Robert Shapiro was raised and educated in New Jersey and Maryland. Shapiro held fellowships at the Max Weinreich Center of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has taught at Baltimore Hebrew University, Yeshiva University, the University of Maryland, the National Yiddish Book Center and the Ramaz School in New York City. He has been at Brooklyn College since 2002.