SCHWARZ, LEO WALDER

SCHWARZ, LEO WALDER (1906–1967), U.S. author and editor. Born in New York, Schwarz was active in communal and educational work. During World War II he was awarded a battle commission in Normandy by General Patton and stayed in Germany until 1947 as the Joint Distribution Committee's director for displaced persons in Munich. This experience formed the basis of his book, The Redeemers (1953), which dealt with the return of Jewish concentration camp survivors to freedom. He was adviser to Jewish students in South African universities (1959–61) and professor of Judaic studies at the Iowa University's School of Religion (1960–62). Among his publications are an anthology of Jewish memoirs and autobiography, Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand   Years (1943, 19632); The Root and the Bough (1949); and several Jewish anthologies, among them The Jewish Caravan (1935, 19652), A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature (1937), Feast of Leviathan (1956), and The Menorah Treasury (1964). He also edited Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People (1956). Together with Louis Linn, Schwarz also wrote Psychiatry and Religious Experience (1958). (Sol Liptzin)