Biography
HENRY (HANK) GREENSPAN holds degrees from Harvard University (B.A, M.Ed.) and Brandeis University (Ph.D.) and held a Junior Fellowship of the Michigan Society of Fellows during which he did his doctoral research. He completed clinical internships (psychology) at the Brandeis Psychological Counseling Center and the University of Michigan Psychological Clinic.
He is a an emeritus psychologist, oral historian and playwright at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who has been interviewing, writing about, and teaching about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s. Rather than one-time "testimony," Greenspan's approach has been multiple interviews with the same survivors over a period of weeks, months, years, and--with a few people--even decades. His work demonstates that how and what survivors retell is different in the context of sustained acquaintance and deepening conversation than in single "testimonies." In 2024, interviews with Hank about his work appeared in the Journal of Holocaust Research (formerly Dapim) with Kobi Kabalek and the Oral History Journal with Malin Thor Tureby. A Festschrift inspired by his work was published in Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History in August 2024. In 2025, he will be one of four recpients of The Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for "extraordinary contributions to the field of Holocaust Studies through groundbreaking scholarship and devotion to students."
Greenspan is the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony (now in its second and expanded edition) and, with Agi Rubin, Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated as well as numerous articles on survivors' retelling, including the chapter on survivors' accounts for the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. A new book is due out in 2025 entitled REMNANTS and What Remains. The volume includes the full playscript, history, and production guidelines for his play, REMNANTS, as well as a sequel, What Remains, which is a series of eight spoken word memoir pieces, "moments from a life among survivors."
He has been the annual Weinmann lecturer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (USHMM). In 2011, he co-led with Wendy Lower the annual Hess Seminar for Professors of Holocaust Courses at the USHMM. In 2012, he was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal. He received the 2020 article award from the Oral History Association for "The Humanities of Contingency: Interviewing and Teaching Beyond 'Testimony' with Holocaust Survivors."
His award-winning play, REMNANTS, was originally produced for radio at WUOM-FM in 1991 and distributed to NPR and APR. Greenspan has since presented it as a one-person stage performance at more than 300 venues worldwide. More recent plays include "Done is Done," "The Spike," "The Perfect Game," "East Angels," "Boxes," "AmericaNirvana," "Arithmetic," "Gravediggers," and "Death / Play, or the Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto." "Gravediggers" is a short one-act set in the midst of the war in Ukraine. "Death / Play" focuses on the perspectives of those who did not survive—and knew they wouldn't. Short plays that have been performed online include "The Rock," "A Man Grieves for his Car," "The Drug War," and "The Stall."
A short version of "Death / Play" received the "audience favorite" award during its two-week live stream in May-June 2021 as part of the "Down to Clown' festival in Brooklyn. REMNANTS similarly received the "fan favorite" award at the 2022 Marsh Theater international Solo Festival in San Francisco in March 2022. Over 1,000 people virtually attended the livestream or watched the recording afteward. Another 1,000 have watched the video since the festival.
Greenspan is also an actor. Most recently he was a Finalist in the 2022 Alvin Epstein Memorial Prize for Solo Performance. He has peformed REMNANTS across the U.S. and Canada as well as in the U.K., France, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Israel. As noted, that includes more than 300 venues. He played "Gancwajch' in his two-hander, "Death / Play," that has now been streamed widely.
REMNANTS is based on Greenspan's decades of sustained conversations with survivors. The piece was originally produced for radio and broadcast on NPR stations across the United States. REMNANTS has won more than a dozen awards including the Attic Theater Center of Los Angeles New Plays Festival, the Henrico National Competition, the New Hope Performing Arts Festival, and numerous public radio awards. Stage venues have included the John Houseman Theater in New York, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Magdeburg Barracks Theatre in the former Theresienstadt camp--a space that was used for performances during the Holocaust itself.
Performance of REMNANTS at the Marsh Theater International Solo Festival, March 2022
https://youtu.be/LVu8XhcMXjw
His essays and poetry have appeared in a range of periodicals including the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Tablet, The Forward, Jewish Literary Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Light Poetry Magazine, Rat's Ass Review, Lighten Up Online, Quatrain Fish, The Deadlands, Poetry Super Highway, Shofar, Covid and Poetry, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Stick Figure Literary Journal, Boston Globe, and the Detroit Free Press. His song lyrics received 2018 and 2019 "outstanding achievement in songwriting" awards (top five finalist) from the Great American Song Contest. His photography has appeared in From Whispers to Roars.
He is the founder of Justice in Michigan, an organization devoted to legal rights in the context of healthcare. See pharmaccountability.org. In 2023, Michigan passed the legislation for which Justice in Michigan had been working for twenty years.
In 2020, he founded "The Schmoozery: At Our Age, In This Age," a discussion group for older adults based at the Osher Lifelong Learning Center at the University of Michigan.
Currently, he teaches online seminars and facitates workshops on "Listening to Survivors" and "Challenges in Interview Interpretation."
Important: For anyone using this page to create copy, the following words and phrases should never be used in descriptions of Greenspan's work: "testimony," "trauma," and "survivors' stories." While these phrases stand for real and important things, it has long been Greenspan's conviction that they have become so generalized that their specific meanings have been lost. To say it differently, they play a larger role in _our_ "stories" _about_ survivors than survivors' own lives and recounting. As in the title of On Listening, we need to go "beyond testimony"--and also beyond "trauma" and "stories" as umbrella terms.
To view an excerpt from REMNANTS from a 2017 performance at Williams College,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ7VcqtfDNo
A ten-minute Storycorps interview on Greenspan's work can be found at:
https://arts.umich.edu/news-features/bicentennial-storycorps-interview-no-12-survivors-have-life-after-life-before-life-during/
"American 'Auschwitz,'" which concerns the surge of Holocaust invocation in the U.S. since the 1970s, can be found in Tablet at https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/holocaust-unexpected-places-greenspan