Kenneth Waltzer earned his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University and has taught at Michigan State University since 1971. He is Professor of History, James Madison College, and Director of Jewish Studies. He was won a State of Michigan Teaching Excellence Award, the Mid-Michigan Alumni Club Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award, and Outstanding Study Abroad Director in the College of Arts and Letters. He has also served as associate dean and interim dean of James Madison College. Currently, he is researching and writing a book on "The Rescue of Children and Youth at Buchenwald."

Professor Waltzer's interests cover American social and political history, especially immigration history, and modern Jewish history during the 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, he was faculty curator (with Kathleen Geissler) of "The American Identity Explorer: Immigration and Migration CD-ROM" (McGraw Hill, 1998, 2001), which was used at MSU and several other universities. He also co-curated (with Kirsten Fermaglich) the award-winning exhibit at the Michigan State University Museum entitled "Uneasy Years: Michigan Jewry During Depression and War." His interests include issues of multiculturalism and inter-group relations, East European Jewish immigration, history and memory about the Holocaust, and the development of two new post-Holocaust centers of Jewish life in Israel and America.

During summer 2004, he researched on clandestine rescue in Warsaw, Poland at the Zydowski Instytut Historyczna and presented on Jewish rescue in Poland at the Midwest Jewish Studies Meeting in October, 2004. During summer 2005, he participated in the Brandeis Israel Studies seminar and engaged in research on rescue at Buchenwald, interviewing former Buchenwald boys in the U.S. Canada, and Israel. He presented on rescue at Buchenwald at the Midwest Jewish Studies Colloquium hosted by the Cohn-Haddow Judaic Studies Center in Detroit, May, 2005, at the Association for the Study of Children and Youth in Milwaukee in August, 2005, and at Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle in November, 2005. He presented on three young children at Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen at Youngstown State in April 2006. During summer 2006, he led the MSU Jewish Studies summer program at Hebrew University's Rothberg School, teaching on American Jewry and Israeli Jewry, and also interviewed former Buchenwald boys in Israel. He presented on rescue at Buchenwald at the World Federation of Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Dearborn in August, 2005, and will speak at the 9th Holocaust Education Series in Montreal in October 2006.