Professor Ken Waltzer discusses a document with a graduate research assistant.

While in Germany at the Red Cross archives, Waltzer researched the Buchenwald
Boys, 904 survivors ages 12 and younger. He looks at a prisoner registration card.

Big Impact

MSU's Waltzer shaped students, academia and Holocaust scholarship for 43 years.

Don Cohen I Contributing Writer

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

International Tracing Service Archives in
Germany, is still keeping him busy.
His findings of an organized network
that rescued young boys at Buchenwald,
including Israel's future Chief Rabbi Meir
Israel Lau and Holocaust scholar Elie
Wiesel, has spawned numerous articles, a
film and will be the topic of two books he
is working on. And he vows to stay politi-
cally active on Jewish and Israel issues.
Waltzer, 72, grew up in what he terms
"Jewish New York:' having been born in
Brooklyn and growing up in the Bronx
and on Long Island.
"I was acutely conscious as a kid of the
ethnic or ethno-religious divides," Waltzer
says. "I had several encounters with anti-
Semitism as a boy and had to fight my way
through them:'
The root of his Jewish identity, politics
and love of education and jazz music was
family life.
"My parents weren't Reds but were
progressives, and they were active in civil
rights," he explains. "My father and all my
uncles were jazz musicians, six total, and
that had an effect by itself. We interacted
in an integrated milieu. My heroes grow-
ing up were [jazz pianist] Oscar Peterson
and [baseball great] Willie Mays:'
Waltzer was active in the New Left
and the SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society) during the 1960s and early '70s.
At the same time, he was grounded in his
Jewish identity.
"I was not alienated from my own

background. I am, and have always been
a self-identified Jew, secular rather than
religious, interested in the history of the
Jewish people in the modern era," he says.
"I consider myself a grandchild of the East
European Jewish migration. Growing up,
I was close with my grandfather, Morris
Waltzer, the patriarch of the large family,
and I think that's the source of my interest
in immigration and urban history:'
And that family life, helped form his. "I
married a beautiful Jewish girl from the
Bronx whose parents were garment work-
ers," he says of his wife, Sandy, with whom
he has two sons. All fits together:'
Waltzer studied American history at
SUNY's Harpur College in Binghamton
before heading to Harvard University in
1964 to study urban history and immigra-
tion with Professor Oscar Handlin, one of
the most prolific and influential American
historians of the 20th century. Waltzer
was a Harvard Prize Fellow, and busy with
activism and teaching as well his degree.
He went to work at MSU in 1971 and com-
pleted his Ph.D. in 1977.
"During the Vietnam War, I was an activ-
ist so it took a while to finish," Waltzer says.
After the assassination of Martin Luther
King Jr. in 1968, he considered working
in the labor movement but was drawn to
MSU's James Madison College and the resi-
dential college movement.

James Madison College
California and Michigan were leaders in
the movement, which Waltzer says was

geared toward establishing "a small col-
lege in the midst of a large university" that
would "highlight excellent teaching, com-
munity spirit and experiment with cur-
riculum:' James Madison College was four
years old in 1971 when Waltzer arrived on
a one-year contract.
"We had probably the best students at
Michigan State; it was a great place to be,"
Waltzer recalls, still excited about the idea
and reality of the residential college. "We
teach that the present comes from the
past. Unless you understand the past, you
won't know how to make choices you face
today:'
Waltzer is proud to have developed a
multidisciplinary course dealing with
immigrant history, and urban history
dealing with Jews, anti-Semitism and
the Holocaust. It traced Jewish life in
Europe, the history of anti-Semitism and
the rise of Nazism to Nazi and interna-
tional decision-making, Jewish reactions
and resulting immigration to the U.S. It
touched on so many areas that Waltzer
says you could get credit in every school
at the university.
"Ken's course on the Holocaust had
a real impact on me and my fellow stu-
dents," said Avi Davidoff, an international
relations major at James Madison and now
Michigan director for AIPAC and on the
board of the Jewish studies program.
"I grew up with Jewish life all around
me, but the Holocaust was Ken's area,"
Davidoff says. "The class had very inter-
esting conversations about different per-

spectives on the Holocaust, and he helped
me realize that I was the one who has to
tell the story. I would give him a good
amount of credit for my passion to work in
the Jewish world and to protect Israel."
In the early-1980s, Michigan's poor
economy put James Madison College on
the endangered list, and it was slated to be
closed.
"It was an important moment, whose
outcome was whether I would spend the
rest of my life in Michigan," Waltzer says.
Putting his already well-worn organizing
skills together with others, it was a strug-
gle, but the college stayed open.
"We survived and thrived," he says.
By the end of the decade, MSU referred
to the college as the "jewel in the crown:'
Waltzer would serve seven years in its lead-
ership, including as acting dean.
"I was always oriented toward curricu-
lum work," he says. His work on integrating
study-abroad programs into the college led
to his becoming the director of Integrative
Studies in the Arts and Humanities in
the College of Arts and Letters, where he
worked on making general education inter-
disciplinary and globally aware.
A recipient of several MSU teaching
awards, Waltzer wants the same for the col-
lege, so he and his wife have established the
Ken and Sandy Waltzer Teaching Excellence
Endowment for James Madison College to
support annual teaching excellence awards.
Building its endowment is just one of the
projects that promises to keep him busy in
retirement.

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March 19 • 2015

