Solon Beinfeld, PhD

Solon Beinfeld, PhD is a Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis, translator, lexicographer, renowned author, and coeditor in chief of the Comprehensive Yiddish-English Dictionary.

Dr. Solon Beinfeld, Professor of History, Emeritus, Washington University, St. Louis. Professor Beinfeld grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family. His father was a teacher for many years in the Workmen’s Circle Yiddish schools in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York. Solon Beinfeld received his PhD in history at Harvard University. While working on his dissertation as a Fulbright Fellow in Paris, he witnessed the fall of the Fourth Republic and the return of de Gaulle. He taught Modern Jewish history for over twenty years at Washington University, and has written extensively on the Holocaust, making extensive use of Yiddish-language sources. He has taught Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle in Boston, and has recently translated Girl with Two Landscapes: The wartime diary of Lena Jedwab-Rozenberg (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2002) and parts of the Kovno Ghetto diary of Ilya Gerber in Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). He was senior consultant and historian to the Kovno Ghetto Exhibition project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and consultant to the Museum on the Ghetto archive holdings in the Lithuanian State Archives in Vilnius.