Robert Moses Shapiro ראובֿן-משה שפּיראָ

Robert Moses Shapiro is a professor of East European Jewish History, Holocaust Studies, and Yiddish Language and Literature at Brooklyn College. Although a native Yiddish speaker born in Germany to Polish Jews from Chrzanow and Sosnowiec, Poland, he undertook advanced Yiddish study at YIVO, Columbia University, and Oxford University, as well as numerous Arbeter-Ring intensive online courses. Since Polish Jewry was multi-lingual, Shapiro supplemented his Yiddish with Hebrew, Loshn Koydesh, Polish and German to access the wealth of primary sources in those languages.

 Shapiro’s doctoral research focused on the pre-Holocaust Jewish community of Lodz, Poland, where his mentors at YIVO, Isaiah Trunk and Lucjan Dobroszycki, were themselves raised and educated. Jewish Self-Government in Poland: Lodz, 1914-1939 (Columbia diss., 1987) paved the way for much of Shapiro’s scholarly research conducted at archives and libraries in the US, Israel and Poland. Translation of scholarly works and primary sources from Yiddish, Polish, German and Hebrew have occupied Shapiro.

 Isaiah Trunk’s monumental Yiddish history of the Lodz Ghetto, published in 1962 by YIVO, became accessible to a broader readership in 2006, through Shapiro’s annotated translation, Lodz Ghetto: A History (Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Another monumental translation project by Shapiro appeared in 2009 as The Warsaw Ghetto Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive: Catalog and Guide, jointly published by Indiana University Press, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Dr. Shapiro collaborated with the University of Lodz Center for Jewish Research on the publication of Encyclopedia of the Ghetto: The Unfinished Project of the Lodz Ghetto Archivists, eds. Adam Sitarek and Ewa Wiatr (Lodz State Archive, 2016).

 Robert Shapiro has taught Jewish history at several colleges, including Baltimore Hebrew College, University of Maryland, Yeshiva University, and Brooklyn College. He has also taught Yiddish language and literature at Baltimore Hebrew College, Johns Hopkins University, Yiddish Book Center at Amherst, and in Lodz for graduate students at University of Lodz. Shapiro has lectured in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish, and served as English interpreter for the late Prof. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski on his acceptance of an honorary doctorate at Baltimore Hebrew College in April 1984. Before the Covid pandemic, Prof. Shapiro was a frequent visitor to Poland, both to conduct research and often to lead Jewish heritage tour groups, both in Poland and in other central and eastern European countries.