Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 67
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-3637 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: bmjw@uchicago.edu

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Biography

Born London 1948. Educated High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester. BA, Modern History, Balliol College, Oxford 1969. Graduate Studentship, Nuffield College, Oxford 1969-73. Visiting Research Student, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1970-71. MA, Oxford 1972. D Phil, Modern History, Nuffield College, Oxford 1974. D Litt, Oxford 2001. Research Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford 1973-5. Junior Lecturer in Politics, Magdalen College, Oxford 1969-70. College Lecturer in Modern History and International Relations, Corpus Christi College, Oxford 1974-6. Lecturer in Modern History, Sheffield University 1976-9. Visiting Lecturer in History and International Relations, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979-80. Associate Professor of History, Brandeis University, 1980-82, Professor 1982-96. Visiting Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1984-5. Dean of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Brandeis University 1990-92. National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship 1994-5. Visiting Fellow, All Souls College Oxford, 1995. President, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Fellow of St Cross College 1996-2000. Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow 2000-3. Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 2002-3. Fellow Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2004-5. Guggenheim Fellow 2007-8. Visiting Fellow, Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv University, 2008.

Publications

My research interests are in the areas of modern Jewish and Middle Eastern history and in the politics and diplomacy of twentieth-century Europe. My first book, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict (1978), analysed the first decade of the Palestine mandate, drawing on the approaches to imperial history suggested by Robinson and Gallagher in their Africa and the Victorians. I then edited two volumes of the letters of the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, dealing with the same period.

In my second monograph, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (1979), again based mainly on recently released British records, I examined the British record in relation to the Jewish genocide in Europe, focussing on British receptivity to Jewish immigration to the UK, to the empire, and to Palestine, on British policy regarding relief supplies sent through the economic blockade to Nazi Europe, and on official reaction to proposals for the bombing of Auschwitz and for aid to Jewish resistance in occupied Europe.

The Jews in Modern France (1985), edited with Frances Malino, brought together essays originally prepared for a conference we organized at Brandeis University.

The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988) was an experiment in biography that drew partly on the models offered by A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo and Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Hermit of Peking.

Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (1992) was a more conventional political biography of the First High Commissioner under the British Mandate in Palestine and the successor to Lloyd George as leader of the British Liberal Party.

Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945 (1996) proposed a radical reassessment of post-Hitler European Jewry; the picture of demographic decline, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution provoked considerable debate.

Secret War in Shanghai (1999), an account of the rivalries of the great powers in North China during World War II, was partly based, like the biography of Trebitsch Lincoln, on the archive of the British-controlled Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch. This evoked some critical reactions on account of its portrait of widespread collaborationism among the foreign communities (including the British and the Americans) in Shanghai.

Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (2001) returned to my earlier interest in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book surveyed the diplomatic history of the Jerusalem question over the past two hundred years, with a close focus on the period since 1967. The book emphasized the historic roots of the current divisions in the city and the exploitation of religious devotion to the city by politicians of all three monotheistic faiths.

Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop? (Yale U.P., 2003), returns to some of the themes of my first book and re-examines them in a larger frame and over a longer period. It focuses in particular on demography, social relations (especially the labour market), and environmental pressures, showing how these have shaped and continue to shape the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

My most recent book, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford U.P., 2007) is a general history of the continent since 1914.

My current research and writing are mainly dedicated to three projects: first, a study of European Jewish intellectuals in the period after 1945; secondly, a book on the Jews in Europe on the eve of the Second World War; and thirdly, a micro-historical study of the relations of Jews with their neighbours in a small Polish town, Krakowiec, over the period 1772 to 1946.

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Bernard Wasserstein

Harriet & Ulrich E. Meyer Prof, Modern European Jewish History
D.Phil. (Oxford), 1974
D.Litt. (Oxford), 2001