from the past and throwing them at windows.' Personal life Hilberg had two children, David and Deborah, by his first wife, Christine Hemenway. After his divorce, in 1980 he married Gwendolyn Montgomery. Deborah moved to Israel when she was 18, acquired dual citizenship, and became a specialist teacher of children with learning disabilities. She has written memorably of her father's approach to rearing in an article composed on the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew translation of The Destruction of the European Jews, in 2012. Hilberg was not religious, and he considered himself an atheist. In his autobiographical reflections he stated, "The fact is that I have had no God." In a 2001 interview that addressed the issue of Holocaust denial, he said, "I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a [historical] record." After his second wife's autonomous decision, 12 years into their marriage, to convert from Episcopalianism to Judaism, in 1993, Hilberg began quietly to attend services at Ohavi Zedek, a Conservative synagogue in Burlington. What he most esteemed, and identified with in his own tradition, was the ideal of the Jew as "pariah". As he put it in a 1965 essay, "Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols ... The Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding." Though a non-smoker, Hilberg died following a recurrence of lung cancer on August 4, 2007, aged 81, in Williston, Vermont. Bibliography Hilberg, Raul (2019) with Christopher R. Browning and Peter Hays. German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solutions. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78920-276-2. Hilberg, Raul (2019) edited by Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott. The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78920-489-6. See also Jan T. Gross Notes References Citations Sources Further reading Andreas W. Daum, "Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians: Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities," in The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide, ed. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016, , pp. 1‒52. External links A book review of Raul Hilberg's biography, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, by Berel Lang "The Destruction of the European Jews" 1926 births 2007 deaths 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers