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.
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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.
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By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — If you missed Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness when it was in the theatres, rent a copy now that it is available on DVD or watch it on your On-Demand cable service. In my opinion it the best Holocaust film since The Pianist. My appreciation of it stems from three […]
The Wandering Review: ‘In Darkness’ Read More »
Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO– There’s been a dearth of Jewish films this summer. I had been hoping to review something that’s currently in release at movie theatres, but I’ve had no luck. I saw The Avengers on the chance that Ben Grimm, the Jewish alter ego of the Thing, would make a cameo appearance, but
The Wandering Review: Jews of the summer blockbusters Read More »
Lawrence BaronBlinky and Me, Directed by Tomasz Magierski (USA: Smoking Mirror Productions, 2012). Available for purchase at www.tomaszmagierski.com By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — What do a a koala cub searching for its mother and a Jewish girl hiding in the forest during the Holocaust have in common? They are all both products of the fertile
The Wandering Review: ‘Blinky and Me’ Read More »
Lawrence BaronForeign Letters, Directed by Ela Their (USA: 2012) By Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Accessibility to films with Jewish themes has never been greater. Before the mass marketing of VCRs in 1975 and the founding of the first annual Jewish film festival in San Francisco in 1980, the only Jewish movies the majority of filmgoers
The Wandering Review: ‘Foreign Letters’ Read More »
Lawrence BaronBy Laurie Baron SAN DIEGO — Note: I recently retired from San Diego State University after teaching there for 24 years and another 13 years at St. Lawrence University. (It is neither true that I taught at a Catholic university at my previous position nor that the school canonized me. It was in upstate New
The Wandering Review: Reflections on Jewish Film Read More »
Lawrence Baron
(January 5, 2011, Column 3) By Donald H. Harrison San Diego and Israel Invitations are going out on Facebook from Tibi Zohar and other active members of the Jewish community to the Balboa Park demonstration planned by Israel advocates to counter another one planned by Palestinians and leftists in behalf of the
A bissel this, a bissel that—Jewish news and chatter in San Diego Read More »
Donald H. Harrison, Eileen Wingard, Lawrence Baron, San Diego CountyBy Donald H. Harrison SAN DIEGO—There is something enchanting about historical research. You can visit a library or an archive in almost any city and provided you read the local language with sufficient understanding, you can peel back the mysteries of the past in pleasant academic surroundings. For historians, genealogists and antiquarians, the lure of
The thrill of an archive brought home to San Diego Read More »
Donald H. Harrison, Lawrence Baron, San Diego Calendar