Holocaust Museum Director Resigns

The newly selected director of the United States Holocaust Museum, who gave the Ingersoll Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School this past Thursday, has resigned just two weeks before he was to take office.

Steven R. Katz, professor of Near Eastern studies at Cornell, offered his resignation Friday after he came under fire for questionable academic conduct.

Katz became a tenured professor at Cornell in 1984.

In March 1991, the Ivy League school barred him from future study leaves because he taught at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 while on a half-year's study leave.

"While we can study on sabbatical leave, we can't teach on study leave, but I did not know that," the Cornell professor said in a recent telephone interview with the Associated Press.

"It was completely out of ignorance," Katz added.

Also, in resumes and university documents dating back to 1983, Katz described a Holocaust book he was working on as "being prepared for publication."

But the project swelled into a multivolume work, and the first volume was not published until last year.

In 1991, Katz's salary was frozen for three years for claiming his Holocaust book was near publication when it was not.

Katz sent a letter of resignation to the Holocaust Museum Friday, saying the "frivolous and non-meritorious allegations which have been asserted would unduly detract" from the work at the museum.

After carrying out an investigation, the museum's board said a week ago that it would stand by Katz, who was scheduled to succeed founding director Jeshajahu Weinberg on March 16.

Katz called his missteps technical violations, but Cornell officially censured him, finding him guilty on both counts of "academic misconduct."

In his speech at Harvard on Thursday night, Katz condemned the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor for other instances of inhumanity.

During his talk, titled "The Holocaust and Historical Memory," Katz did not discuss his plans concerning his position with the Holocaust Museum.

This story was compiled with wire dispatches.