About the Meir Project

The Meir Project honors Dr. Michael A. Meyer, Adolph S. Ochs Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is an “ember saved from the fire” of the Shoah, arriving as a child in the United States in 1941, one of the last Jews whose family was able to flee Nazi Germany. Professor Meyer is a prolific author, lecturer, and gifted pedagogue. He received the National Jewish Book Award three times. One of those awards was for literally “writing the book” on Reform Judaism in his magisterial work “Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism.” Published in 1988, it remains the major reference work on the subject. He continues to work in his retirement, publishing “Rabbi Leo Baeck, Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times,” in 2021, a biography of the leader of German Jewry during the Nazi Period. Dr. Meyer also served as the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History.

Dr. Ann Millin retired from a career with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as a senior historian, educator, and archivist. I served at the American Jewish Committee office in Israel, directing it before retiring. She and I completed our doctorates with Professor Meyer and collaborated in setting up this website in his honor. Michael Meyer taught for 50 years, mostly at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion campus in Cincinnati, working mainly with rabbinical students. I am a rabbi who first met him in that context and continued to study with him in a doctoral program after ordination. Ann was a graduate student who sought him out for doctoral work on Jewish History during the period of the Shoah. For Ann and me, he was a demanding, inspirational teacher who ensured that we did graduate work at the highest level. We owe him a debt of gratitude and honor, of which this website is a modest component of repayment in the currency he most appreciates. That is the spread of ideas, tools for teaching those ideas, and thought provoking comment on events that impact the world Jewish community.