Arizona State University professor Michael Rubinoff is a Chicagoan by birth, but he's been in Arizona so long he's practically a native.
"Next year will make half a century," says the 59-year-old film and media studies professor, who attended fourth-grade religious school at Temple Beth Israel with Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon (the two also graduated from Central High School together) and became a bar mitzvah through Rabbi Albert Plotkin.
Rubinoff's father was the vice president of Ramada Inn, which was based in Phoenix, and his mother stayed at home to raise Rubinoff and his brother, Harry, who is a retired prosecutor for the city of Phoenix. Rubinoff left Arizona to get his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Denver and then worked in Washington, D.C., for 17 years, first for various research organizations and then for the federal government as deputy assistant secretary of commerce under the first George Bush.
He returned to Arizona in 1996 to spend time with his mother. In the spring of 1997, he began teaching at ASU, hired by the Jewish studies department to teach a course on the Holocaust.
"In college (at ASU) I actually taught the Holocaust, so it was in my repertoire," he says, although he notes that in 1976, "there were no references. I had a chance to deal with the whole thing before it became 'Shoah business.' There were not many classes like that, not in the U.S. It was a different time."
Eventually, he began to teach other classes at ASU, and in 2006 he was switched into the film and media studies department. Today, he teaches classes on the Holocaust in film, baseball in film, Hollywood musicals and media and politics. "Fox News covered us watching the presidential debate last year," he says. "We were the top-of-the-hour story." Next spring, he will teach a course on anti-Semitism in the media.
Rubinoff is also the point person at ASU for the Arizona Holocaust Institute Initiative, which was established in 2007 through a partnership among Northern Arizona University's Martin-Springer Institute, the University of Arizona's Center for Judaic Studies and ASU's Jewish studies program, encouraged by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
According to its Web site (jewishstudies.clas.asu.edu/azhite), the initiative "facilitates an interdisciplinary and interagency dialogue among faculty, teachers and Holocaust educators to improve and foster Holocaust education throughout Arizona. Initially, the initiative's emphasis was on teacher education, but all disciplines and students can gain from the lessons of the Holocaust."
The original focus of the initiative was primary, middle school and high school teachers, Rubinoff says, "but the truth is the content is important to get into the hands of future college professors." To that end, "we talked about doing a state program for teaching assistants who are in graduate degree programs at ASU, NAU and U of A. It's the (teaching assistants) who are the future history professors. Unless they're exposed to content, they're not going put that in their courses."
For Rubinoff, the most rewarding thing about teaching the Holocaust has been "turning on young people ... to asking questions about the past and to, in some instances, taking it on professionally." He cites former student and local Holocaust educator Kim Klett, a teacher at Dobson High School in Mesa, as a case in point.
But, he admits, teaching the Holocaust so much can be "fatiguing."
"I last taught it in the spring of '06," he says. "One student, who became a friend and who came from a German background, said, 'I hope none of my family members were involved with that kind of thing.'"
