March 18, 2021 | 7pm PST
In this time of reckoning with our state’s grim legacy of discrimination and hate, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland has partnered with allies to create a series of public programs to educate the greater community about the history of discrimination in our state and learn how, as people of good will, to come together to confront hate. The panel discussion includes Ellen Eisenberg, the Dwight and Margaret Lear chair in American History at Willamette University, where she teaches courses on the history of the U.S., Bob Horenstein, Director of Community Relations of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, and Judy Margles Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.
We are grateful for your participation and encourage you to consider supporting our virtual programs.
Bob Horenstein has served as Director of Community Relations of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland since 1994. In this role, Horenstein has directed the Federation’s efforts to safeguard the social safety net, promote civil rights, combat hate and bigotry and strengthen the local community’s ties to Israel. He is also a freelance writer, having been published in the Oregonian, Jerusalem Post and The Forward, and is a regular contributor to the Jerusalem Report, an English-language bimonthly Israeli magazine. Horenstein has been awarded the American Jewish Press Association Louis Rapoport Award for Excellence in Commentary, and he was recognized by the Oregon Society of Professional Journalists for Excellence in Journalism. He is a frequent speaker at local synagogues, churches and schools and has lectured, among other places, in Juneau, Alaska, Springfield, Illinois, Vancouver, B.C., and at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. Horenstein earned a Master’s degree in political science, specializing in Arab-Israeli politics, from Portland State University in 1993. He is married to his wife Dorice, with whom he has a daughter and two sons.
Judy Margles is the Director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) in Portland, Oregon. During her tenure she has managed the merger of the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center and the Oregon Jewish Museum, and the purchase of a permanent home for the museum, which opened in 2017. Previously she served as Curator at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Margles speaks frequently at conferences and professional meetings. Her essay, Cross Cultural Engagement at the Oregon Jewish Museum appears in Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles and Immigrants, published by Routledge in 2017. Margles is a Past Chair of the board of the Council of American Jewish Museums and served on the board of the American Alliance of Museums between 2013 – 2019.
Ellen Eisenberg holds the Dwight and Margaret Lear chair in American History at Willamette University, where she teaches courses on the history of the U.S. since the Civil War, with an emphasis on immigration, ethnicity, and race. She recently taught a first-year seminar focusing on historical memory and the controversies over monuments, titled “Whose History? Whose Memory?”
Her published work includes five monographs and a number of articles on American Jewish history, with a focus on the American West. The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII was a 2008 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Recent works two volumes on the history of Jews in Oregon, titled Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849-1950 and The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950-2015. She is currently editing an anthology tentatively titled Jews as Whites, Jews as Others: Relational Identities in the American West, which is under contract with Brandeis University Press.
