Lawrence (Laurie) Baron, now retired, served as the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He served from 1988 to 2006 as director of SDSU’s Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies. He was the founder in 1995 of the Western Jewish Studies Association.
He writes two satire columns for San Diego Jewish World: “Humoring the Headlines” under his byline, and “Hounding the Headlines,” under the byline of his dog Elona.
Books to his credit, available on Amazon, include:
Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema
The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema
The eclectic anarchism of Erich Muhsam (Men & movements in the history & philosophy of anarchism)
His most recent articles are:
“Making Room for the Jews: The House I Live In (1945),” AJS Perspectives, Summer 2023, 86-88.
“The Revolt of Job: Salvaging the Lost World of Rural Hungarian Hasidim,” Journal of Jewish Identities, 16:1-2 (January/July 2023), 181-198.
“Persistent Parallels, Resistant Particularities: Holocaust Analogies and Avoidance in Armenian Genocide Centennial Cinema, in Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction, ed. Sarah M. Ross and Regina Randhofer (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), 267-296.
“The Pioneering American Jewish Women Directors from Elaine May to Claudia Weill,” Jews and Gender (Studies in Jewish Civilization), ed. Leonard Greenspoon (W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021), 217-243.
By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Having studied and taught about the Holocaust for 37 years, I realize that many stories from of it remain untold because their participants died while it was occurring or remained silent to rebuild their lives and avoid traumatizing their children. When spelunker Chris Nicola journeyed to the Ukraine in […]
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO –Brian Helgeland’s 42 is an old fashioned Hollywood biopic. Spanning Jackie Robinson’s recruitment by the Brooklyn Dodgers and first year in the National League, the film presents idealized depictions of both Robinson played by Chadwick Boseman and Branch Rickey played by Harrison Ford. Ford steals the movie like Robinson stole
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Growing up in Chicago, Shabbat was not a day of prayer and rest, but for going to the movies. Every Saturday I trundled over to the neighborhood theatre and watched morning screenings of cartoons, capped off with a Flash Gordon episode. After lunch, I’d return for the double feature.
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Lawrence BaronLOS ANGELES –Members of the annual Western Jewish Studies Association Conference will pay tribute to one of its past presidents, Lawrence Baron, PhD., former head of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies at San Diego State University and, in retirement, a reviewer of Jewish-interest movies for San Diego Jewish World, among other pursuits. At an
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Lawrence Baron, San Diego CountyBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — When you think of Holocaust movies, you conjure up the black and white images of corpses and and skeletal survivors preserved on film by military camera crews as they followed Allied troops liberating concentration and death camps. Feature films like The Pawnbroker or Schindler’s List employ the same
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO –Eytan Fox’s Yossi and Jagger (2002) holds a special place in Israeli film history as the first commercially successful mainstream movie about gay lovers. It won two Israeli Television Academy Awards and many prizes at various LGBT film festivals around the world. Its tale of two Israeli male soldiers furtively developing
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO –While I love the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, I have chosen not to favor one film over another by reviewing it here. My hesitance to do so testifies to both the quality and quantity of the motion pictures being screened. The SDJFF is simply a celluloid smorgasbord loaded with
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — One of the notable things about this year’s Oscar nominations is the absence of films about the Holocaust. I wonder if this is a result of what Simone Schweber has termed, “Holocaust fatigue.” According to her, overexposure to the Holocaust in education and popular culture may have inadvertently desensitized
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — In an article published last week in the Times of Israel, Jessica Steinberg welcomed “a remarkable first for the Israeli film industry: Two local films were named Thursday among the five documentaries nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.” The Gatekeepers directed by Dror Moreh and Five Broken Cameras directed
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — One of the hats I wear is that of the chairperson for the Jewish Film Festival shown in conjunction with the annual Association for Jewish Studies Conference which met last week in Chicago. This provided me with the opportunity to share with my colleagues Numbered, an emotionally engaging and
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO– Now that the candles have been lit, the blessings recited, the latkes eaten, the dreidels spun, and the gifts exchanged, it’s time to sit your touchas down in the couch and watch a movie about Hanukah. The problem is that there just aren’t many major films about the holiday and
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — I went to see The Sessions because it had generated a lot of buzz after winning the Audience Award at this year’s Sun Dance Film Festival. Based on the trailer I had seen, I knew it was about a paralyzed man named Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) who sought
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Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Currently playing at the Hillcrest Cinemas, The Other Son places a switched-at-birth plotline in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. After Joseph, the son of an Israeli couple takes a blood test for service in the IDF, his mother and father are informed that he is not biologically related
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Lawrence BaronSimon and the Oaks, directed by Lisa Ohlin (Sweden, Germany, Norway: 2011). By Laurie Baron Note: I haven’t written my column for several weeks because I’ve been giving lectures around the country. Indeed, I was stranded in West Hartford, Connecticut, for two extra days due to Hurricane Sandy. Having endured two other hurricanes in New England in
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Lawrence Baron