Executive Director Emeritus, Dr. Gary P. Zola

Gary Phillip Zola served as the executive director of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA) from 1998 through June of 2023.  Currently, Dr. Zola maintains his faculty status as the Edward M. Ackerman Family Distinguished Professor of the American Jewish Experience & Reform Jewish History at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).

Dr. Zola has been honored with national appointments, including being selected by President Biden in 2023 as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. Notably, in April 2011, President Obama appointed Dr. Zola to the Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad, marking a historic moment as the first faculty member of Hebrew Union College to receive such recognition from a U.S. president. Further, in 2006, Dr. Zola achieved groundbreaking milestones by becoming the inaugural American Jewish historian and the first American rabbi appointed to the Academic Advisory Council of the congressionally recognized Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.