Born in New York City (in the shadow of the old Yankee Stadium) and raised in the Los Angeles’ suburbs, Harold Brackman received his doctorate in from UCLA in 1977 for a dissertation on the history of Black-Jewish relations. After a decade in academic teaching, he joined the Simon Wiesenthal and its Museum of Tolerance as a senior consultant. Dr. Brackman’s longstanding interest in the history of African Americans and Jews produced an award-winning study of Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg, and the Jewish role in the integration of major league baseball (Journal of Sports History, 1999, coauthored with Steven H. Norwood), and an influential essay exploring in the context of the Holocaust W. E. B. Du Bois’ evolving views of Jews (American Jewish History, 2000). In the early 1990s, his scholarly and polemical pursuits converged when he authored the first book-length account, Ministry of Lies (Simon Wiesenthal Center 1992; Four Wall Eight Windows Publishers, 1994) to debunk the Nation of Islam’s anonymously-written tract, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (1991), alleging “Jewish domination” of the slave trade. Over the decades working with the Wiesenthal Center and the MOT, Dr. Brackman has broadened his interests to include research and writing on Los Angeles’ intergroup “parallelogram” (African Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Asian Pacifics) as well as global racism and anti-Semitism. His new book—coauthored with Ephraim Isaac—is From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press).
