Photo of Bernard Wasserstein
Bernard Wasserstein Areas of Study: Modern Jewish Prof. Wasserstein has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students. Office: 167 Nassaukade
Amsterdam 1053 LL
The Netherlands Email
Harriet & Ulrich E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Modern European Jewish History and the College

University of Oxford, DPhil' 74
University of Oxford, DLitt' 01

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, 1973-75. College lecturer in modern history and international relations, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1974-76. Lecturer in modern history, Sheffield University, 1976-79. 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, 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. Visiting fellow, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, Uppsala, 2011-12. Corresponding fellow of the British Academy, 2012. Allianz Visiting Professor of Jewish History, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich, 2015-16.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

  • The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict (Royal Historical Society, 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.

  • Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1979), again based mainly on recently released British records, examined the British record in relation to the Jewish genocide in Europe, focusing 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 (University Press of New England, 1985), edited with Frances Malino, brought together essays originally prepared for a conference organized at Brandeis University.

  • The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Yale, 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. The Crime Writers’ Association awarded this book their Golden Dagger for Non-Fiction.

  • Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford, 1992) was a 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 (Harvard, 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 (Houghton Mifflin, 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 book elicited 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 (Yale, 2001) returned to 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, 2003) re-engages with some of the themes of The British in Palestine and re-examines them in a larger frame and over a longer period. It analyses, in particular, demography, social relations, especially the labour market, and environmental pressures, showing how all of these have shaped and continue to shape Israeli-Palestinian relations.

  • Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford, 2007) is a general history of the continent since 1914. The twentieth century witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent. It was a century of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and retraction, of authoritarian repression and of individualism resurgent. Barbarism and Civilization attempts to encapsulate and reinterpret the experience of Europeans in the course of the tumultuous twentieth century.

  • On the Eve: the Jews of Europe before the Second World War (Simon & Schuster, 2012) portrays European Jewry on the brink of its destruction. It examines the existential crisis that Jews faced throughout the continent and shows that the challenges to collective Jewish survival came as much from within as without. On the Eve discusses Jews' hopes and fears, anxieties and ambitions, family ties, internal and external relations, their cultural creativity, amusements, songs, fads and fancies, dress, diet, and, insofar as they can be grasped, the things that made existence meaningful for them. The fundamental objective is to restore forgotten men, women, and children to the historical record, to breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones. The book was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2013.

  • The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard, 2014) challenges the ahistorical interpretation of the role of the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe that was offered by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Gertrude van Tijn’s work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, enabling many Jews to escape to safety. Some later called her a heroine; others denounced her as a collaborator. Was she merely a pawn of the Nazis, or should she be commended for taking advantage of such opportunities as offered themselves to save Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

  • A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, The Place We Went Back To (Allen Lane, 2023) ‘A little place – you won’t have heard of it’ is what my father used to say when people asked him where exactly our people came from. Krakowiec is a small town situated on what is today the border between Ukraine and Poland. It also lies at the epicentre of the tumultuous national and ideological conflicts that have shaped the destiny of modern Europe. This book traces the history of the town over the past six centuries; it analyses the evolving patterns of social interaction among its three communities, Jews, Ukrainians (Greek Catholics), and Poles (Roman Catholics); and it retrieves the story of my family’s intimate, tortured relationship with a place that we once called home. 

Kenneth Moss
Kenneth Moss Areas of Study: Modern Jewish Office: William Rainey Harper Memorial Library, West Tower, room 601 Mailbox 36 Office hours: Winter Quarter 2025 Monday, 1:00-3:00pm Phone: (773) 834-9430 Email Interests:

Modern Jewish history; Russian and Polish Jewry, East European Jewry; history of Jewish nationalism, Zionism, and Diasporism; modern Hebrew and Yiddish culture and literature; Jewish secularism and post-secularism; Palestine, Yishuv, Israel; history of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish culture, politics, and futurity; comparative history and sociology of nationalism; sociology of culture as an institution; history of social theory.
Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College

Stanford University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Jewish politics, culture, literature and thought in the modern era and in our own day. Trained in global Jewish history since the 18th century, I teach and lecture on many aspects of the modern Jewish experience, but my scholarship focuses particularly on Jewish political thought and struggle in Eastern Europe in the era of nationalism, on the unfinished history of secular Yiddish and Hebrew literary and cultural creativity, and – currently – on the forces that have shaped the deep conflicts that wrack Jewish life today in Israel and the United States.

Much of my work to date has asked how Jewish visions of cultural and political self-determination were realized, frustrated, unmade, or recast across the 20th century from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to Palestine and Israel and what happened to Jews in the process.

In 2023, Yale University Press published a volume I co-edited with Israel Bartal, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Volume 7 of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, offers an annotated collection of over 900 primary sources selected to try to encompass every major trend and genre in Jewish cultural production around the globe during the 1880-1918 period. These sources, drawn from nearly twenty languages, are to accompanied by a substantial scholarly apparatus: biographies and bibliographies of each of the authors/artists and a monograph-length introduction which comprises the first attempt I know of to offer a full synthetic account of the global and regional forces, ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic commitments, and political, economic, and cultural conditions that shaped Jewish creative life in this stormy era.

My 2021 book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Harvard University Press), traces how pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community reckoned with nationalism’s pathologies, diaspora’s fragility, Zionism’s promises, and the problem of choice under conditions of powerlessness and danger. An Unchosen People combines intellectual and social history, examining the works of Polish Jewry’s most searching Zionist and Diasporist thinkers as they confronted political irrationality, state crisis, the crisis of culture, and the limits of resistance while also recovering a lost grassroots history of critical thought and political searching among ordinary Jews as they struggled to find a viable future for themselves—in Palestine if not in Poland, individually if not communally. Supported by a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, An Unchosen People has received the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council, the 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA), and honorable mention for the 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

My 2009 Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Harvard University Press) examines the triumph and tragedy of bids for Yiddish and Hebrew cultural renaissance amidst total war and revolution. Recovering bold artistic creativity and nation-building undone by violence and repression, Jewish Renaissance demonstrates the intensity of Jewish engagement with the liberal ethos of culture and art as vehicles of freedom, and the surprisingly deep impact of that ethos on Jewish nationalism. Jewish Renaissance received the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and has now appeared in revised Hebrew translation as Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023).

Thus, where the first arc of my research asks how Jews participated in a modern dream of freedom and self-determination through art, this second arc investigates how the East European Jewish experience speaks to two other, grimmer global histories: the history of progressive social thought’s ongoing struggle to make sense of the unexpected powers of the politics of hate and fear, and the history of minority confrontations with majority pathologies they cannot change and with the imperatives of communal triage under conditions of powerlessness and danger.

Looking ahead, I am now turning my attention to the post-Holocaust and postwar Jewish world and to the conflicted Jewish life of our own time, with equal interest in the US, Israel and Palestine, and global Jewish itineraries. I am embarked on a study of the American Yiddish poet Arn Glanz-Leyeles, Jewish Americanism, and the fate of Jewish humanism after the Holocaust. I am pursuing research on East European Jewish refugee thought about fascism, religion, and reactionary politics, starting with the writings of Jewish refugees given shelter in wartime Japan.  A project provisionally entitled Israel’s Future: A History will investigate how state and military planners, intellectuals both establishment and anti-establishment, business circles, and now-dominant illiberal nationalist and ethnoreligious parties and thinktanks have approached Israel’s future (as well as the future of the occupied territories and the future – or interminable present – of the Palestinians under occupation) as an object of planning, debate, intervention, power, and critique in ethnopolitical, economic, security, political-theological, environmental, and global-catastrophic idioms.

Finally, I am embarking on a history of the Jewish present – a Jewish history for the 21st century organized not by the horizons and hopes of the 18th and 19th century (above all Enlightenment and Emancipation) but as an effort to better understand the phenomena that are recasting Jewish life today, many of them unexpectedly and in unanticipated ways. These include illiberal ethnonationalist political projects in Israel which are transforming that polity even as we speak; intense forms of religiosity that are not only centered in Israel but also now have a global reach; a multi-faceted gender revolution that now finds women at the center of organized Judaism and the question of gender equality at the heart of some of its fiercest debates; unprecedented forms of ‘post-Jewish’ hybridity in the US and Europe which suggest that much of what Jewish creativity will be and mean in coming decades will fall in an ever-widening space between complete disappearance on the one hand and all forms of organized and committed Judaism on the other; and Jewish participation in – and also new and disturbing roles and representations in – debates about global precarity, inequality, and disaster. An essay on the relations between religion and nationalism both in Judaism and in a comparative vein, written with Roger Friedland, captures some of my lines of thought about the first and second of these dimensions, as does an expanded version of the conclusion to my first book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, written in 2022 for the Hebrew translation thereof. 

From 2014 to 2020, I coedited the journal Jewish Social Studies with Tony Michels and Sarah Stein.

In 2021, I co-edited with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages (University of Pennsylvania). 

I have also written comprehensive encyclopedia articles on the biography of Y. L. Peretz and the history of Jewish printing and publishing 

And, of course, I’ve written on St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and the construction of Irish American identity.

My work has appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese. Between 2003 and 2021, I taught Jewish history in the city where Shaul Tshernikhovski's poetry first appeared in print.

 

Teaching Interests

In addition to introductory courses on modern Jewish history from the 18th century to the present, I have taught specialized seminars on East European Jewry, the history of Palestine and Israel from the Mandate period to the present, Jewish religion and secularity in Eastern Europe and Israel, 20th century Jewish politics and political thought, the history of the Holocaust, Jews and the city, and the history of the idea of Jewish culture. I teach in the Jewish Civ track at the University of Chicago. I have also taught undergraduate courses on 20th century social theory; the history and sociology of nationalism; and the transatlantic history of racial and national minorityhood 1880-1939 (with Michael Hanchard). At the graduate level, I teach modern Jewish historiography and have taught specialized seminars on modern Jewish politics; Mandate Palestine; histories of nationalism; the institution of culture; and theories and histories of secularism and religion in modernity and the present.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

  • Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023) (= revised and expanded Hebrew version of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, trans. Michal Perez).

  • An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); winner 2022 National Jewish Book Award for History from the Jewish Book Council; 2022 Oskar Halecki Award for Polish and East Central European History from the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA); honorable mention, 2022 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). 

  • Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009; winner, 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, National Jewish Book Council). 

Edited Volumes
Selected Articles and Chapters

  • “‘Du vest mayn libshaft nisht mevayesh zayn, Amerike!’”: Glants-Leyeles, der problem fun dem yidishn humanizm nokhn khurbn, un di frage fun Amerikes andershkayt [“You will not put my love to shame, America!”: Glants-Leyeles, the problem of post-Holocaust Yiddish humanism, and the question of American exceptionalism], trans. Zackary Sholem Berger with author, Afn Shvel: gezelshaftlekh-literarisher zhurnal, forthcoming.

  • [Co-authored with Israel Bartal], “National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880-1918: Introduction” Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: Anthology of Primary Sources, Documents, Texts, and Artifacts in 10 Volumes, v. 7: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918 (Yale University Press, 2023), xlvii-cxxxi.

  • “Sikum,” Yemei ha-ma’asim: tehiyat ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-tkufat ha-mahpekhah ha-rusit (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2023) (= new conclusion for Hebrew version of Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution), 367-396.

  • “From Zionism as Ideology to the Yishuv as Fact: Polish Jewish Relations to Palestine on the Cusp of the 1930s,” in From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages, ed. Moss, Benjamin Nathans, and Taro Tsurumi (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 271-304.

  • [Co-authored with Benjamin Nathans and Taro Tsurumi], “Mediating Zionist History and East European History,” in From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages, ed. Moss, Nathans, and Tsurumi (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 1-15.

  • [Co-authored with Roger Friedland], “Thinking through Religious Nationalism,” in Words: Religious Language Matters, eds. Asja Szafraniec and Ernst van den Hemel (Fordham University Press, 2016), 419-462.

  • “Negotiating Jewish Nationalism in Interwar Warsaw,” in Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis, ed. Glenn Dynner and Francois Guesnet (Brill 2015), 390-434.

  • “Thinking with Restriction: Immigration Restriction and Polish Jewish Accounts of the Post-Liberal State, Empire, Race, and Political Reason 1926-1939,” East European Jewish Affairs 44:2-3 (December 2014): 205-224.

  • “At Home in Late Imperial Russian Modernity – Except When They Weren’t: New Histories of Russian and East European Jews, 1881-1914,” in Journal of Modern History, v. 84, 2 (June 2012): 401-452.

  • "Tsienizm in dem goles-natsyonalistishn gedank: Maks Vaynraykh in Palestine," in Afn shvel: gezelshaftlekh-literarisher zhurnal, n. 356-357 (Zumer-harbst 2012): 21-27.

  • “Arnold in Eishyshok, Schiller in Shnipishok: Imperatives of ‘Culture’ in East European Jewish Nationalism and Socialism” in Journal of Modern History, v. 81, 3 (September 2009): 537-578.

  • “Bringing Culture to the Nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the Dilemmas of Jewish Cultural Formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917-1919” in Jewish History 22 (2008): 263-294.

  • “1905 as a Jewish cultural revolution? Revolutionary and evolutionary dynamics in the East European Jewish cultural sphere, 1900-1914” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews: a Turning Point?, eds. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 186-198.

  • "Not The Dybbuk but Don Quixote: Translation, Deparochialization, and Nationalism in Jewish Culture” in Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 196-240.

  • “Printing and Publishing: Printing and Publishing after 1800” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  • “Yitshok Leybush Peretz,” in Dictionary of Yiddish Writers, ed. Joseph Sherman (Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 2007).

  • Between Renaissance and Decadence: Literarishe Monatsshriften and its Critical Reception” in Jewish Social Studies, v. 8, 1 (Fall 2001): 153-198.

  • “St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845-1875” in Journal of Social History, v. 29, 1 (Fall 1995): 125-148.

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Photo of David Nirenberg
David Nirenberg Areas of Study: Intellectual Islam and the Middle East Medieval Europe Modern Jewish Social History Dean, Divinity School
Faculty Member, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Member, Medieval Studies
Faculty Member, Renaissance Studies Office: Foster Hall, room 308 Mailbox Foster 35 Phone: (773) 702-3423 Email Interests:

Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean; medieval ideas about communication, exchange, and social relations; history of race and racism; history of ideas
Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Social Thought, Medieval History, Fundamentals, Middle East Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the College

Princeton University, PhD '92

BIOGRAPHY

I have spent most of my intellectual life shuttling between the micro and the macro, trying to understand how life and ideas shape and are shaped by each other. One stream of my work has approached these questions through religion, focusing on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I explored the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the history of ideas. More or less simultaneously in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), I tried to bring the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies, interactions between lived experiences and conceptual categories shape how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other. Then in Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), I focused on how thinking about Judaism shaped the ways in which Christian cultures could imagine the possibilities and limits of community and communication.

Beginning with my book Anti-Judaism, which stretched from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century in order to try to understand the work done by a family of concepts across history, I have tried to cultivate a new approach to the “long history” of ideas. My most recent book, Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, written in collaboration with Ricardo Nirenberg (a mathematician who happens also to be my father), follows this path as well.  It explores the long history of the various types of sameness that underpin the claims of different forms of knowledge (from poetry and dreams, to monotheism, math, and physics), using these to think critically about the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities.  I am now at work on the long history of yet another family of concepts, namely the inter-connected history of race and religion from the Neolithic to the present.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

Coauthored with Ricardo Nirenberg. Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, twentieth-anniversary edition with new preface, 2016.

Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015.

Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

  • Review of Neighboring Faiths and Anti-Judaism by Carlos Fraenkel, "We Hear and We Disobey," London Review of Books (May 21, 2015): 31–34.

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013.

Discusses book on US Holocaust Memorial Museum podcast
Awarded Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 1998. Spanish translation: Comunidades de Violencia: Persecución de minorías en la edad media. Peninsula Editorial, 2001; French translation: Violence et minorités au Moyen Age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.


  • 2000 John Nicholas Brown Prize, Medieval Academy of America

  • 1998 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association

  • 1998 Best First Book in Iberian History, Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies

  • 1996 Premio del Rey Prize, American Historical Association

Edited Volumes

  • Coedited with María Elena Martínez and Max Hering Torres. Race and Blood in Spain and Colonial Latin America. LIT-Verlag, 2012.

  • Coedited with Herbert Kessler. Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Selected Articles

  • "The Impresarios of Trent: The Long and Frightening History of the Blood Libel." Nation (November 16, 2020).

  • "What Is Islam? (What Is Christianity? What Is Judaism?)." Raritan 35 (Fall 2016): 1–14.

  • "Love." In What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature, and History, edited by Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman, 46–54. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

  • With Leonardo Capezzone. "Religions of Love: Judaism, Christianity, Islam." In The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, edited by Adam Silverstein and Guy G. Stroumsa, 518–535. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

  • "Power and Piety: Is the Promotion of Violence Inherent to Any Religion?" Nation (Apr. 29, 2015).

  • "Posthumous Love in Judaism." In Love After Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff, 55–70. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.

  • "'Judaism' as Political Concept: Toward a Critique of Political Theology." Representations 128 (Fall 2014): 1–29.

  • "'Judaism,' 'Islam,' and the Dangers of Knowledge in Christian Culture, with Special Attention to the Case of King Alfonso X, 'the Wise,' of Castile." In Mapping Knowledge: Cross-Pollination in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Arabica Veritas, vol. I, edited by C. Burnett and P. Mantas-España, 253–76. Cordoba: Oriens Academica, 2014.

  • "Sibling Rivalries, Scriptural Communities: What Medieval History Can and Cannot Teach Us about Relations between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam." In Faithful Narratives, edited by Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo, 63–82. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.

  • "Christian Love, Jewish 'Privacy,' and Medieval Kingship." In Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner, and Anne E. Lester, 25–37. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

  • Coauthored with Ricardo Nirenberg. "Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematical Ontology." Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 583–614. Response by Alain Badiou and a reply by us, "Critical Response." Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 362–87.

  • "From Cairo to Cordoba." Nation (June 1, 2011).

  • "When Philosophy Mattered." New Republic (Feb. 3, 2011): 39–43.

  • "Shakespeare's Jewish Questions." Renaissance Drama (2010): 77–113.

  • "Double Game: Maimonides in his World." London Review of Books (Sept. 23, 2010): 31–32.

  • "Anti-Zionist Demography." Dissent (Spr. 2010): 103–9.

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Cover of "Neighboring Faiths"

 

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Tara Zahra Areas of Study: Empires/Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Human Rights International Modern Europe Modern Jewish Russia and Eurasia Roman Family Director, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Faculty Board, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
Member, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies Office: Social Science Research Building, room 213 Mailbox 85 Office hours: Winter Quarter 2025 Wednesday, 2:00-4:00pm Phone: (773) 834-2599 Email Interests:

Modern Europe; Central and Eastern Europe; Habsburg Monarchy and Successor States; transnational and comparative history; international history; gender, childhood and the family; nationalism; migration and displacement; humanitarianism and human rights
Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History and the College

University of Michigan, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

Tara Zahra's research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. Her latest book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars will be published by W.W. Norton Press in 2023. With Pieter Judson, she is currently working on a history of the First World War in the Habsburg Empire. Zahra is also the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016) and, with Leora Auslander, Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell, 2018). Her previous books include The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011) and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Cornell, 2008).

Graduate Advising

I welcome applications from graduate students interested in Central European history (including Habsburg, East European, and German history) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as European international history and transnational history. Some of my current and former PhD students have worked on the history of gender and sexuality in late Imperial Vienna; migration and the family in postwar West Germany; the body in late Socialist Czechoslovakia; Jewish culture in postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, Roma in postwar Hungary; colonialism and empire in Poland and Germany; and masculinity and coal mining in Socialist Czechoslovakia.

Recent Course Offerings

Undergraduate

  • Writing Family History (junior colloquium)

  • Human Rights in World Civilization

  • Twentieth-Century Europe

  • History of Human Rights (in Vienna)

  • East Central Europe in the Twentieth Century

  • Nazism (junior colloquium)

  • European Civilization I & II

  • Gender & Sexuality in World Civilization

  • Migration and Displacement in Twentieth-Century Europe

Graduate

  • History and Anthropology of the Present (with Susan Gal)

  • Seminar: Globalization and Its Discontents (with Jon Levy)

  • Transnational Europe: Twentieth Century

  • Nations & Empires (with Susan Gal)

  • Nationalism in East Central Europe


  • Unsettled Europe: Migration and Displacement in Modern Europe


  • Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe (with Leora Auslander)


  • Historiography (with Emily Osborn)

  • Migration and Material Culture in Modern Europe (with Leora Auslander)

University and Departmental Service

  • Roman Family Director, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

  • Faculty Sponsor of Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe Workshop

  • Executive Board, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

  • Faculty Affiliate, Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality

  • Editorial Board, Past & Present

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. New York: W.W. Norton, 2023.

Coauthored with Pieter Judson, The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, in progress.

Coauthored with Leora Auslander. Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.

The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

  • George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association, 2012

  • Radomir Luza Prize, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2012

Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008; paperback, 2011.

  • Book Prize, Czechoslovak Studies Association, 2009

  • Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 2009

  • Hans Rosenberg Book Prize, Conference Group for Central European History, 2009.

  • Book Prize, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2008-2009

  • Laura Shannon Prize, Nanovic Institute, 2008–2009

Articles

  • “Migration, Mobility, and the Making of a Global Europe,” Contemporary European History 31 (February 2022), 142-54.

  • “Against the World: The Collapse of Empire and the Deglobalization of Interwar Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 52 (2021)

  • “Fin d’empire et genre de la déglobalisation,” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 53, 2021.

  • "'Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge': Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Habsburg Empire." American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (Jun. 2017).

  • "Europe's Shifting Borders." Foreign Affairs (Feb. 11, 2017).

  • "Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in Late Imperial Austria." Past & Present 223 (May 2014): 161–93.

  • "Forum: Habsburg History." German History 31 (Jun. 2013): 225–38.

  • With Pieter M. Judson. "Introduction." Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 21–27.

  • [Papers from the May 2008 symposium, "Indiference to Nation in Habsburg Central Europe."]

  • "Going West." East European Politics and Societies 25 (Nov. 2011): 785–91.

  • 
"'The Psychological Marshall Plan': Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II." Central European History 44 (Mar. 2011): 37–62.

  • "Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre." Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 66 (Apr.–Jun. 2011).

  • "'A Human Treasure': Europe's Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism." Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945–1949 Past & Present Supplement 6 (2011): 210.

  • "Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis." Slavic Review 69 (Spr. 2010): 93–119.

  • "'Prisoners of the Postwar': Expellees, Refugees, and Jews in Postwar Austria." Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010): 191–215.

  • "Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe." Journal of Modern History 81 (Mar. 2009), 45–86.

  • "The Minority Problem: National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands." Contemporary European History 17 (May 2008): 137–165.

  • "'Each Nation Only Cares for Its Own': Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1918." American Historical Review 111 (Dec. 2006): 1378–1402.

  • "Looking East: East Central European 'Borderlands' in German History and Historiography." History Compass 3, no. 1 (2005): 1–23.

  • "Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945." Central European History 37 (Dec. 2004): 499–541.

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Faith Hillis Areas of Study: Cultural Digital Empires/Imperialism Intellectual International Modern Europe Modern Jewish Russia and Eurasia Social History Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies (CEERES)
Faculty Board, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Board, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies
Faculty Board, Digital Studies
Associate Faculty, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Office hours: Winter Quarter 2025 Wednesday, 10:30am-12:00pm Email Interests:

Modern Russia; Modern Europe; intellectual history; urban history; nationalism, empires, and imperialism; political culture; migration and mobility; Jewish history; transnational and international history; digital history and cartography
Professor of Russian History and the College

Yale University, PhD '09

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. My work explores how Russia's peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia's relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, I am interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.

My most recent book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. It is the recipient of the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES, which recognizes the most important contribution in any discipline of Slavic studies. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe's "Russian colonies"—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the "Russian colonies" as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia's relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

My first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus' argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus' was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

I am currently working on a new history of the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion written for a popular audience. This book offers a new account of how this notorious text came to be, and it asks what history's greatest conspiracy theory can tell us about the present moment, when conspiratorial thinking is again on the rise in society and politics.

My current research is enriched by technology, and I am interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. I am particularly interested in using geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space. For examples of my (ongoing) work in digital cartography, see my Utopia's Discontents website in development and my study of émigré publications.

I have held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

I am represented by Kathleen Anderson (kathleen@andersonliterary.com) of Anderson Literary Management.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications
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Photo of Leora Auslander
Leora Auslander Areas of Study: Caribbean-Atlantic History Cultural Empires/Imperialism Gender and Sexuality Modern Europe Modern Jewish Race Founding Director, Affiliated Faculty, and Member of the Board, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Member, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies Office: William Rainey Harper Memorial Library,
West Tower, room 608
Mailbox 75
 Phone: (773) 702-7940 Email Interests:

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century European social and cultural history with a focus on France and Germany; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment; Jewish history; gender history and theory; race in the Atlantic world; colonial and postcolonial Europe
Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and History

Brown University, PhD '88

BIOGRAPHY

The primary national focus of my research is modern France, but I have found myself intrigued by research problems best treated transnationally. My most recent book, Cultural Revolutions, moves across the Atlantic world from Britain, to colonial and early national America, and finally eastwards again to France. My ongoing pair of projects, Strangers at Home and Conundrums of Commemoration, stay on the European continent but involve a comparative analysis of Paris and Berlin in the twentieth century. Finally, although I have not yet published extensively in this area, I maintain an active interest in and regularly teach the history of European colonialism and the postcolonial world it left behind.

Conceptually, my work focuses on the intersection of material culture, everyday life, and politics. I seek to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis, informed by phenomenology and feminist theory, that key to answering these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, but a close and careful study that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.

Although the courses I offer are necessarily broader and more general than this research agenda, they have been systematically informed by it. I use material and well as visual and textual sources in virtually all my classes, and nearly all are transnational in reach.

TEACHING

Undergraduate courses (selected)

  • Problems in Gender Studies

  • Europe 1930 to the present

  • Colonizations Civ III

  • Jewish Civ III

  • Modern Jewish History

  • Cultural Revolutions

Graduate courses (selected)

  • Seminar: Religion, Politics and Society in Modern Europe (with John Boyer)

  • Everyday Life in Modern Europe (with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

  • Seminar: The Politics of Memory in France and Germany (with Michael Geyer)

  • Gender in Europe (with Susan Gal)

  • Seminar: Race, Racism and and Anti-Racist Movements in Modern Europe

Recent fields for general examinations

  • Modern European History

  • Modern French History

  • Gender History and Theory

  • Culture and Politics in Modern Europe

  • European Social History

Titles of some recent (or current) AB and AM theses and PhD dissertations

  • Islam and the Republic: A Study of the Effects of the Algerian Civil War on French Understandings of Islam

  • Female Action and the Closing of the Women’s Clubs during the Reign of Terror

  • War Relic: Revisiting the Leaning Virgin of Albert

  • Working Class Milieus under Attack: Struggles between the Left and Right in Leipzig and Lyon, 1929–1936 (co-chair with Michael Geyer)

  • The Evolution of French Abolitionism and the Memories of the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1815–1848

  • The Ground Beneath their Feet: Agricultural Industrialisation and the Remapping of Rural France, 1954–1976

  • Making Islam French Unsettling French Algeria: Settlement, Terror, and Violence in the French-Algerian War, 1954–1962.

  • The Permanent Souvenir: Tattoos and Travel from Banks to Barnum Cultivating the Nation, Refining Empire: Wine, Sugar, and Nation-building in Guadeloupe and the Aude, 1880–1910

  • The Imperialism of Un-Free Trade: Nineteenth Century British Wine-Trading Enclaves in Oporto, Madeira, and Andalusia

  • Writing Black, Talking Back: Consuming, Performing, and Selling Race in Postwar France, 1945–1968

  • From Children to Citizens: Republican and Catholic Primary Education in France, 1880–1914

  • Fashioning the Folk: The Production and Reproduction of Alsatian Traditional Dress, 1871–1939

  • The Rebirth of the Mediterranean: Migrants, Race, Nation, and Labor in the Western Mediterranean, 1914–1940

  • Pale Fire: Jews in Revolutionary White Russia, 1917–1929 (cochair with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

  • Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Capital

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

My publications in the domain of material culture and the histories of production and consumption include two books: Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France (Oxford: Berg Press, 2008; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); French translation (Presses Universitaires de Mirail, 2009) and Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). I am also currently working on two book-length projects in this area: The Everyday of Modern Citizenship: France and Germany 1918–1940 and Conundrums of Commemoration.

My articles on material cultural and politics include "Perceptions of Beauty and the Problem of Consciousness," in Lenard Berlanstein, ed. Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: Univeristy of Illinois Press, 1993); "After the Revolution: Recycling Ancien Régime Style in the Nineteenth Century," in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth Williams, eds. Recreating Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 144–174; "The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-Century France," in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds. Sex of Things: Essays on Gender and Consumption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 79–112; “Regeneration through the Everyday? Furniture in Revolutionary Paris,” in a special issue of Art History 28, no. 1 (Spring 2005), ed. Katie Scott, and; “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review (October 2005); “Historians and Architectural History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2006).

My work on material culture, postcolonialism, and everyday politics in contemporary Europe includes three essays: "'Sambo' in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of the Everyday," (coauthored with Tom Holt) in Susan Peabody and Tyler Stovall, eds. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, (Raleigh, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); "Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Practices and the Postmodern European State," Cultural Dynamics 12/3 (2000): 183–209 and "Accommodation, Resistance, and Eigensinn: Evolués and Sapeurs between Africa and Europe," in Belinda Davis, Michael Wildt, eds. Alltag, Erfahurng, Eigensinn: Historisch-Anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2008), pp. 205–217.

My most recent area of research is at the intersection of Jewish history and material culture. Some early thoughts on those questions may be found in "'Jewish Taste'? Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942," in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar, 299–318 (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002). That reflection has taken a somewhat different turns in "Resisting Context: The Spiritual Objects of Tobi Kahn," in Objects of the Spirit: Ritual and the Art of Tobi Kahn, ed. Emily Bilski, 71–78 (New York: Avoda/Hudson Hills, 2004);  "Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris," Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 237–59; and "The Boundaries of Jewishness or when is a Cultural Practice Jewish?" Jewish Social Studies (Spr. 2009). Finally, "Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies" for a volume edited by Alf Lüdtke and Sebastien Jobs, submitted September 2008, is my most recent venture in this area.  

My work in the field of feminist history and gender studies includes Différence des sexes et protection sociale (XIXe–XXe siecles), a coedited volume with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995); "Feminist Theory and Social History: Explorations in the Politics of Identity," Radical History Review 53 (Fall 1992): 158–76; "Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?" differences 9, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 1–30; Le genre de la nation. Fall 2000 issue of Clio: Histoire, femmes et sociétés on gender, citizenship, and the nation, coedited with Michelle Zancarini-Fournel; "Women's Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany,1871–1918," in Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake, 138–52 (London: Macmillan, 2001); "Gender at the Intersection of the Disciplines," Cahiers Parisiens/Parisian Notebooks 2 (2006): 434–46; and an issue on "Judaïsme(s): genre et religion" for Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 44 (2016), co-edited Sylvie Steinberg.

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