Freund's Book is Finalist for ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award

The cover of Richard Freund's book, "Digging through History: Archaeology and Religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust ."

Professor Richard Freund's new book, Digging through History: Archaeology and Religion from Atlantis to the Holocaust (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012) is a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards finalist in the category of religion.

Winners of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards will be announced at the American Library Association conference in June.

Freund, who is director of the University's Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, also has given a number of  lectures and presentations recently.

Freund presented a paper entitled "Cultural Property and Provenance Issues in the 21st Century" at the Conference of American Jewish Museums held in March at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. Freund's paper dealt with artifacts discovered during excavations related to the Holocaust at extermination camps such as Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec. Others on the panel dealt with the new 9/11 Museum artifacts and artifacts from the Iraqi Museum that belonged to the Jewish community.

Also in March, Freund gave a lecture at the Archaeological Institute of America's St. Louis branch on his book, Digging through History. Freund also gave a lecture on "The Sobibor Documentation Project and Excavations" at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum, and he gave a paper at the American Schools of Oriental Research Conference in St. Louis on the University of Hartford's archaeological projects in Nazareth, Israel, at Mary's Well and Bathhouse and the Church of the Annunciation.