Bernice Lerner

Bernice Lerner is the author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and other writings on the Holocaust and on virtue ethics. She is the former dean of adult learning at Hebrew College, former lecturer on the Holocaust at Boston University, and a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. With a career-long commitment to celebrating the power of stories in building healthy lives, Dr. Lerner has brought her wisdom to many Ikeda Center projects. At the 2011 Ikeda Forum, “Cultivating the Greater Self,” she spoke of the wisdom of Victor Frankl. In 2014, she participated in the seminar, “Creativity, Peacebuilding, and Education.” She also was a participant in the Center’s yearlong 2019 experiment in sustained intergenerational dialogue. In 2020, the Center’s Mitch Bogen interviewed Dr. Lerner about All the Horrors of War, and in 2023 she joined The Dialogue Studio podcast to discuss themes from the book in relation to key themes at the Center, including the greater self.

Photo: Eliezer Katzoff