Garber was born into a Jewish family and attended Bar-Ilan University in Israel,[1] and he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in Hebrew from Hunter College.
He earned a master of arts degree and completed his course work for PhD in Religion at the University of Southern California.
[5][6][7] He was the Visiting Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in 2005.
[10] Garber established the first Jewish Studies program in a public school of higher learning in the State of California at Los Angeles Valley College (1971).
His (and Bruce Zuckerman) advocacy of Shoah not Holocaust as the term of record for the murder of European Jewry during WW II, presented at the Oxford Conference ("Remembering for the Future," 10–13 July 1988) was among the first to advocate careful terminology to describe the Jewish genocide.