Barry Trachtenberg

Barry Trachtenberg

  “A Genuine Gift”: Barry Trachtenberg (‘91) Remembers Days of Activism and Growth -- Memory #42 of 100  

Today’s Project 100 memory is from Barry Trachtenberg.   He was born and raised in Newington, Connecticut.  He attended public schools and graduated from Newington High School in 1987.  His father was a salesman for General Mills.  His mother was a homemaker while Barry was young and later became receptionist in a physician’s office.  After graduating in 1991 from Glassboro State College with a Bachelor’s degree in English, he enrolled in a Master’s degree program in history at the University of Vermont, focusing on American history and the history of the Holocaust.  After earning his MA, he then taught at the Community College of Vermont (CCV) for one year before travelling to Britain to earn a postgraduate diploma in Jewish Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.  He returned to Vermont and did various jobs, including teaching again at CCV and also working as a baker, while applying to doctoral programs.  In the Fall of 1996, he enrolled in the doctoral program in European Jewish history at the University of California Los Angeles, working under David N. Myers.  During the next several years, he travelled and studied in Britain, Germany, and Israel/Palestine.  While completing his doctorate, he began at the State University of New York at Albany as an assistant professor of Jewish Studies in 2003.  In 2010, he moved from the Department of Jewish Studies to the Department of History.  In the Fall of 2016, he took a position at Wake Forest University as the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History and was, in 2023, promoted to full professor at Wake Forest. 

*****

I was not a great high school student.  I was not very focused.  In my senior year, I fell in with a group of friends who were more academically-oriented, and I did well on the SAT exam.  I knew that I did not want to stay in Connecticut.  I actually wanted to go to the University of Cincinnati, and I was accepted.  However, my parents said that it was too far.  One of the other colleges to which I had applied was Glassboro State.  It had come up on a search that I had done due to a cooperative education program, which had been something of interest to me as a result of my father’s experience at Northeastern.  In any event, after my parents eliminated Cincinnati, Glassboro State appealed to me because it was near a major city but not in one.  So, I enrolled as a business major. However, in 1987, there was a major stock market crash, and my enthusiasm for business declined.  I loved to read, so I walked down the hall and switched my major to English.  I did not tell my parents for a year.

Sometime during my first year, a person handed me a flyer from the Coalition for Progressive Action (CPA), a group of students and faculty who were working on progressive causes.  The person who handed me the flyer was named Bill Barlow, and he became my best friend.  I started hanging out with this group.  I attended my very first protest, in support of an Irish Republican Army prisoner being held in New York City.  I remember that attending this rally was thrilling. I got to meet several faculty and staff through the CPA, including Dan Dougherty and Rose Glassberg.  Rose helped me understand the history of Jewish protest and activism.  I got involved with another group, the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (NJPIRG).  We waged a major petition campaign in support of establishing a chapter of this group on campus.  President Herman James initially supported the group, but we were opposed by the Board of Trustees because the chairman of the Board worked for Educational Testing Services (ETS). This organization, which ran the SAT, was a target for reform by NJPIRG.  Another cause that my friends and I worked on was protesting the government’s reaction to the AIDS epidemic.  We stenciled the slogan “Silence = Death” on the side of Laurel Hall.  We also protested housing issues, including a change by GSC that dorm residents could not have visitors after midnight. We staged a massive rally outside of Hollybush, keeping President James up very late.  It was one of the largest and most diverse rallies at Glassboro State, and it succeeded in getting the policy changed.  Many of those who participated in that rally ended up getting involved in other protests.  As a result of all these actions, I became involved in student government, and I decided to run for office.   In my senior year, I won and became president of the Student Government Association.  That was the year of the First Gulf War, and we did much protesting of that conflict.

As an English major, I took five classes with Ed Wolfe, mostly on British and Irish literature.  Right after I graduated, in the summer of 1991, I went on a backpacking tour of England and Ireland, visiting many of the places that I had first learned about from Dr. Wolfe.  He was an incredibly dynamic teacher, and he was one of the most influential professors that I took at GSC.  He gave me a lifelong love of reading.

Although I was an English major, I did not know anything about literary theory because that course was not taught until the senior year.  Meanwhile, I had some very important courses in the Department of History, which did introduce me to theory.  David Applebaum was an incredible mentor.  He taught me that there were different ways of looking at the past and that these views were often in conflict with each other.  Moreover, he showed me that these differing views often arose out of the time and context in which they were conceived, meaning that history is always being shaped by the present and modern politics.  In my junior year, I was running for President of Student Government Association. If I had lost, I would have studied abroad in France. Some days, I wish that I had lost that election.  However, on other days, I am very proud of the work we did in SGA my senior year.  In any event, my decision to attend graduate school in history and to become a historian, as opposed to English, had much to do with this new perspective I gained from David Applebaum’s classes. 

Another faculty member that was very important to me was Gary Hunter.  He introduced me to the work of James Baldwin, who remains to this day one of the most important writers in my life.  Dr. Hunter’s course on the Civil Rights Movement was also very powerful, as it showed to me and my friends that what we were doing in our protests was part of a longer continuum.  We could learn from this earlier work and build off of it.  Most importantly, we learned that we were far from alone in doing such work to make the world better.

I look back at my time at Glassboro now as the period when I began to grow into my full self. It was a place in which I felt free to take risks and make mistakes.  It was a place where I could begin to question so many of the assumptions that I had about the world. I received a terrific education at Glassboro both in and outside of the classroom, and I look upon my time there as a genuine gift.

*****

This is part of the Department of History’s “Project 100,” the collection and sharing of one hundred memories by Glassboro State College and Rowan University alumni and staff in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Glassboro Normal School, later Glassboro State College, and now Rowan University.