Peretz

“The information is wild, is not controlled right,” said Peretz, the first-time volunteer.

Peretz, a U.S.-based artist, said the volunteers weren’t there to do forensic work; he thought the soldiers who cleared the houses of explosives beforehand were handling that process.

Peretz and Sholem Asch — as well as science and history texts, translations of classics like Shakespeare and Guy de Maupassant, even cookbooks and sex manuals — were being consigned to dumpsters, attics and cellars.

The man born Peretz Bernstein has been lauded as the “godfather of alternative rock.”

And unless they had sifted through faded yellow papers in their archives, they could not have known that the first Middle East expert on the AJC’s staff, Don Peretz, lost his job because Israeli diplomats did not like his research on the Palestinian refugee issue.