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Irwin M. Berent is a historian, genealogist, writer, archivist, and lecturer who has written more than ten books and numerous articles on a wide variety of subjects.
An internationally published wordsmith, Mr. Berent has co-authored with Dr. Rod Evans several books, including Getting Your Words' Worth (Warner Books, 1993), Weird Words (Berkley Publishing Group, 1995), More Weird Words (Berkley, 1995), and A Dictionary of Highly Unusual Words (Berkley, 1997), as well as an interpersonal communications book (The Right Words, Warner Books, 1992) and The ABC Of Cat Trivia (with Introduction by Betty White; St. Martin's Press, 1996).
He has also co-written with Dr. Evans scholarly works including Drug Legalization: For and Against (with Introduction by Hugh Downs, foreword by Linus Pauling, Open Court, 1992), and The Quotable Conservative (Introduction by William F. Buckley; Adams Publishing Co., 1996).
He co-compiled with David Zubatsky Jewish Genealogy: A Sourcebook of Family Trees and Histories (Avotaynu, 1990), a classic Jewish genealogy reference work. And in the 1980s he was the genealogy columnist for the National Jewish Post and Opinion. He is also the founder of the first Jewish genealogy club outside of New York - the Jewish Genealogical Club of Tidewater, founded 1978. His research on his own family - whose roots include the Caplans, Glassers, and Shermans of Ligum and Pakroy, Lithuania; the Resniks and Rutenbergs of Papile, Lithuania; the Karps and Goldsteins of Bausk, Latvia, and the Berents and Shapiros of Chorzelle, Poland - is also extensive. He also conducted for the Chicago Jewish Archives a published survey of the Jewish communal records of West Rogers Park, the last major Jewish section of Chicago. He is also the author of Norfolk, Virginia: A Jewish History of the 20th Century.
Mr. Berent has also served as archivist of the Monitor Research and Recovery Foundation, coordinated the 125th battle anniversary "reunion" of the descendants of the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (Merrimack) crews, and compiled The Crewmen of the USS Monitor: A Biographical Directory (N.O.A.A., N.C. Div. of Archives and History, 1985). His Monitor/Merrimack crew collection is housed at the Mariner's Museum Archives in Newport News.
Listed in all the editions of Who's Who In America since 2000 (as well as Who's Who in the South and Southwest, 1999), Mr. Berent holds a Master's degree in American History (his thesis covered the history of North Carolina's capitol square monuments and statues), and he speaks on a wide variety of social issues including fundamentalism, drug policy, and media violence. He is also the president and web-designer for the Writers SuperCenter (writersupercenter.com), a leading Internet-based reseller of writer's software for business, non-fiction, and fiction. And he is co-creator (with John Jarvis) of StoryCraft Software, a fiction-writing program. In his spare time, he collects letterheads and billheads of 19th-century Norfolk businesses. He is currently completing the compilation of The Norfolk, Virginia Atlas-Gazetteer.
