Dr. Rebecca Erbelding 

Rebecca Erbelding is a historian of American responses to the Holocaust and the author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, published by Doubleday in 2018, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. She served as a historical advisor and an on-camera expert in Florentine Films’ The U.S. and the Holocaust, directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein. She is currently working on a new book, Shelter on the Lake: 982 Holocaust Refugees and an American Small Town, which will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2026. Rebecca is an educator, curator, and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She frequently presents on the War Refugee Board; US immigration policy during the 1930s; and the “Hoecker album,” a photograph album owned by Karl Hoecker, the final adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her work on the Hoecker album has been adapted into a theatrical production, Here There are Blueberries, written by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, which was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and debuted off-Broadway in 2024. She holds a PhD in American History from George Mason University.