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Ann Saltzman

JACQUELINE BERKE, Professor of English Emerita and Co-Director of the Center for Holocaust Study, has taught literature and writing in both the College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School at Drew and served as Director of the Writing Program from 1965 to 1985. She is the author of a rhetoric text Berke's Twenty Questions for the Writer (Harcourt Brace, 6th edition, 1996), widely used in freshman composition classes throughout the country. She has also served as research director, consultant, and coordinator of a series of writing-related research projects such as the federally funded "Project English" (1965) and a computer centered composition "experiment" sponsored by the N.J. Department of Higher Education (1985).

From a feminist perspective--in the 1970's--Berke gave such courses as "Men Writers on Women/Women Writers on Men," and published such articles as "Mother, I can do it Myself!: The Self-Sufficient Heroine in Popular Girls' Fiction." Writing about women in literature, she concentrated on mothers and daughters in the works of Kate Chopin, E.M. Broner, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others. Berke's paper, "Jane Austen, a Feminist for All Seasons," was selected for presentation at the Bicentennial of Jane Austen's birth (City College, NY). Berke has since continued to address herself to feminist criticism: she contributed an entry on the Jewish-American novelist Violet Weingarten to the current edition of The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in America (Oxford University Press, 1995), and has presented at various conferences and women's studies groups a paper entitled "Rescuing Women's Voices from the Holocaust: An Exploration."

In the mid-eighties Berke was resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts. In 1986 she received Drew's Presidential Citation, the "Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award." In the same year, she began teaching courses on Holocaust literature, becoming in 1991 founder and first director of the Drew University Center for Holocaust Study, joined the following year by Ann Saltzman as co-director. They began to offer a variety of innovative interdisciplinary "paired seminars" and "shared seminars" which served as the basis for a paper they later presented jointly at a conference co-sponsored by Wittenberg University and Yad Vashem in 1993. Entitled "Teaching the Holocaust: The Case for an Interdisciplinary Approach," the paper appeared as an article in an anthology New Perspectives on the Holocaust: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars (New York University Press, 1996).

In the summer of 1991, Berke attended the Yad Vashem (Israel) "Seminar for Educators from Abroad." In 1992, she was appointed to the Advisory Board of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education (Seton Hill College, PA) and the following year served on the American Committee of the International Scholar's Conference ("Remembering for the Future," Berlin, 1994) at which she presented a paper on the diary of Anne Frank, entitled "The Diary of Anne Frank: Widely Acclaimed but Wantonly Betrayed". Berke continues to study Anne Frank and will offer an entire course in Spring 1999 on Anne Frank: The Life, The Legend, The New and Definitive Edition of the Diary. This past year she coordinated a new multidisciplinary "core course" at Drew entitled "Perspectives on the Holocaust." Drawing on lecturers from history, psychology, literature, religion, and theology, this course serves as a requirement for Drew's newly instituted concentration in Holocaust Studies.

As Co-Directors of Drew's Center for Holocaust Study, Berke and Saltzman create and oversee the annual programs and activities of the center, aided and sustained by a remarkably capable contingent of associates/volunteers.

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About Co-Director Ann Saltzman