During the weeks following the conference, there were articles, editorials, op-eds, and letters to the editor about Prof. Norwood’s research in newspapers from coast to coast, and as far away as Turkey, India, Israel, Malta, and New Zealand. Prof. Norwood also appeared on a number of radio talk shows to discuss the issue. The combined reading and listening audiences that were made aware of Harvard’s relationship with the Nazis totalled in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Stimulating this kind of public discussion of the Harvard-Hitler issue was a major goal of our conference, as it is of most such conferences.

As for Prof. Norwood himself, he was not “obscure” prior to the conference, nor has he “returned to obscurity” as Grynbaum erroneously asserted. Norwood is the author of three critically-acclaimed books on American history (one of which won the Herbert G. Gutman Award in American Social History) and numerous scholarly articles, and he is co-editor of the prestigious Encyclopedia of American Jewish History. During the three months following the conference, when Grynbaum seems to think that nothing further happened on this issue, Prof. Norwood was completing a major scholarly essay on Harvard’s relationship with the Nazis, which will be published shortly by American Jewish History, the leading scholarly journal in the field.

RAFAEL MEDOFF

Melrose Park, Penn.

April 22, 2005

The writer is Director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.