Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

John K. Roth is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College, where he taught for more than forty years and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (now the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights). In the mid-1980s, he joined Gordon Bjork and the late Ward Elliott to establish CMC’s Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program. In 1988, Roth was named U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Roth is the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Failures of Ethics (2015), Sources of Holocaust Insight (2020), Warnings: The Holocaust, Ukraine, and Endangered American Democracy (2023), and Stress Test: The Israel-Hamas War and Christian-Jewish Relations (forthcoming 2025). He has been Visiting Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, and his Holocaust-related research appointments have included a Koerner Visiting Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in England as well as an appointment as the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

An honorary member of the Claremont McKenna College Alumni Association, Roth has received its George C. S. Benson Distinguished Achievement Award. The holder of several honorary degrees, he has also received the Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for Holocaust Studies and Research.

Professor Roth’s presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights where he remains an active and engaged advisory board member.