Even on his deathbed, Glenn Earley was still planning teaching appearances in South Bay schools for the coming weeks and months. The longtime Holocaust educator had already instructed well over 100,000 area students but was never content to stop teaching.
“He was a warrior, intellectually speaking. He was indefatigable,” said longtime colleague Jack Weinstein.
Earley, the National Conference for Community and Justice’s coordinator of interreligious relations and Holocaust education for the South Bay region since 1983, died on Dec. 31 at age 48. While he had been battling leukemia for some time, he suffered a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse, and his death came as a shock to family, friends and co-workers.
“He probably trained more teachers and students to think critically about horrors of history like the Holocaust than was humanly possible for anyone you can imagine. He was working pretty much solo through the NCCJ for 20 years,” Weinstein said.
Bart Charlow, executive director of the NCCJ’s Silicon Valley branch, said Earley possessed “immense courage. And he was a skilled rhetorician — he allowed you to walk away with your dignity even when he was kicking the pants off your knowledge.”
Charlow recalled how Earley had taught a Holocaust course to hostile “groups of punk gangs” and won them over.
“He had a way with kids that was extraordinary. If you can imagine trying to get thousands of restless teens from various cultures, many of whom didn’t even have English as their first language, to sit through this subject, that is really extraordinary.”
Earley was raised in a Protestant home, but, as a young man, came to idolize Simon Wiesenthal and established a correspondence with the famed Nazi-hunter. Even as a very young man, Earley decided his life’s mission would be to educate people about the Holocaust.
“The Holocaust just offended his sense of the way the world should be. I think it was something about his innate sense of justice,” said the Rev. Andrew Kille, a San Jose Baptist minister who worked alongside Earley for the past two decades running interfaith dialogue sessions.
“The fact that people were ignorant of the Holocaust and therefore not learning anything about it was even worse. He was very direct; he didn’t sugarcoat things. He was willing to deal with his students as human beings who were capable of dealing with Holocaust issues. He didn’t pull any punches and I think the students respected that.”
Colleagues remembered Earley as a big, jovial bear of a man with a wry sense of humor and a stunningly encyclopedic knowledge of the Holocaust and American hate groups. He was also a gifted orator, who was equally at home teaching young children or adults, and he established an excellent rapport with the survivor community. Many of his weeklong school programs culminated with a classroom visit from a Holocaust survivor or an Army veteran who had helped to liberate a concentration camp.
“Many of the people who hosted him in their classrooms did it year after year, not just for an hour but for a week at a time. That’s a high level of trust; in a classroom you don’t give up your forum lightly,” said Weinstein, director of the educational nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves.
Earley, a San Jose resident and board member of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, graduated from Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania with a double major in English and religion. He received his master’s and Ph.D. in religion from Temple University.
In addition to his work with the NCCJ, he also served as an adjunct assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University since 1983, and had taught at San Jose State , Rutgers and Temple Universities.
He is survived by his wife, Wendy, and sons Andrew, a student at SJSU, and Isaac, a young teen. Memorial services were held Monday at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos.
“Although he himself did not claim any organized religious tradition, he encouraged all of us to be better about our own traditions,” said Kille.
“I think he saw the great need for people of the religious communities to be able to work together and stay in communication with each other and not be destructive. He worked long and hard at that.”
The Earley family requests that donations be sent to the Glenn Earley Education Fund at Wells Fargo Bank, attention Melody Hom, 420 Montgomery St. No. A0101-071, S.F., CA 94104.