Bernard Wasserstein

Last updated

Bernard Wasserstein (born 22 January 1948 in London) is a British and American historian.

Contents

Early life

Bernard Wasserstein was born in London on 22 January 1948. Wasserstein's father, Abraham Wasserstein (1921–1995), born in Frankfurt, was Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His mother, Margaret (née Ecker, 1921–2017), was born in Budapest. [1] He was educated at the High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Boys' Grammar School, Leicester. He earned a BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford in 1969 and a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1974. [2] In 2001 he was awarded the 'advanced research degree' of DLitt by Oxford University. His brother, David J. Wasserstein, is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His sister, Celia Wasserstein-Fassberg, is Professor of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Career

Wasserstein was a Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford (1973–5). [3] He taught at the University of Sheffield (1976–9) and Brandeis University in Massachusetts (1980–96), where he was Professor of History and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He was President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (1996–2000) and Fellow by Special Election of St Cross College, Oxford. He was Professor of History at the University of Glasgow (2000–2003). From 2003 to 2014 he was Ulrich and Harriet Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting fellow of the Institutes of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala, All Souls College, Oxford, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007–8 and has also held fellowships of the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for Humanities. In 2015–16 he was Allianz Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was a member of the London executive of the Leo Baeck Institute (1997–2003), President of the Jewish Historical Society of England (2000–2002), and a board member of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute, Amsterdam. In the spring of 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv. His books have been translated into French, German, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hungarian, and Dutch. Now an emeritus professor of the University of Chicago, Wasserstein is retired from teaching but continues to engage in historical research and writing.[ citation needed ]

Personal life

Wasserstein is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom. He is married to Shirley Haasnoot, a Dutch journalist and historian. He has one son and one daughter and lives in Amsterdam.

Awards and honours

Selected works

Books

Audio

Related Research Articles

Jewish studies is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history, Middle Eastern studies, Asian studies, Oriental studies, religious studies, archeology, sociology, languages, political science, area studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies. Jewish studies as a distinct field is mainly present at colleges and universities in North America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yehuda Bauer</span> Israeli historian of the Holocaust (born 1926)

Yehuda Bauer is a Czech-born Israeli historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Michael Robert Marrus was a Canadian historian of the Holocaust, modern European and Jewish history and international humanitarian law. He is the author of eight books on the Holocaust and related subjects.

Cecil Roth was a British Jewish historian. He was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

Martin David Goodman, FBA is a British historian and academic, specialising in Roman history and the history and literature of the Jews in the Roman period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Stillman</span> American historian

Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam, b. 1945, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World", a project that includes over 2000 entries in 5 volumes.

Richard I. Cohen, also known as Richard Yerachmiel Cohen is a professor of history, presently holding the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in the history of Jews in Western and Central Europe in the modern period, in particular the Jews of France, art history, Jewish historiography, and The Holocaust.

Eric L. Santner is an American scholar. He is Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, and Chair, in the Department of Germanic Studies, at the University of Chicago, where he has been based since 1996. A graduate of Oberlin College in 1977, Santner received his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin, in 1984, then going on to teach at Princeton University.

Joshua Prawer was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Ferziger</span>

Adam S. Ferziger is an intellectual and social historian whose research focuses on Jewish religious movements and religious responses to secularization and assimilation in modern and contemporary North America, Europe and Israel. Ferziger holds the Samson Raphael Hirsch Chair for Research of the Torah with Derekh Erez Movement in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. He is a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and is co-convener of the annual Oxford Summer Institute for Modern and Contemporary Judaism. He has served as a visiting professor/fellow in College of Charleston (2017), Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK (2013), University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (2012), and University of Shandong, Jinan, China (2005). In 2011, he received Bar-Ilan's "Outstanding Lecturer" award. Ferziger has published articles in leading academic journals of religion, history, and Jewish studies and is the author or editor of seven books including: Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity ; Orthodox Judaism – New Perspectives, edited with Aviezer Ravitzky and Yoseph Salmon ; and most recently Beyond Sectarianism: The Realignment of American Orthodox Judaism, which was the winner of a 2015 National Jewish Book Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies</span>

The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (OCHJS) is a recognised independent centre of the University of Oxford, England. Its research fellows teach on a variety of undergraduate and master's degrees in Oriental studies, and it publishes the Journal of Jewish Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern</span> American Jewish historian

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is an American historian, philologist and essayist, noted in particular for his studies of the institution of Cantonism, his critique of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's controversial two volume-work about Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, as well as translations of Jorge Luis Borges' works into Russian. He is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University where he teaches Early Modern, Modern and East European Jewish history.

Ezra Spicehandler was an American rabbi, writer, editor and educator specializing in modern Hebrew literature.

Jonathan Brent is an American academic, author, historian and publisher. As a publisher, he is the director of the Annals of Communism series, which he founded in 1992. He is currently the CEO and executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, as well as Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guy Stroumsa</span> Israeli scholar of religion (born 1948)

Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa is an Israeli scholar of religion. He is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is a scholar of Performance and Jewish Studies and a museum professional. Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, she is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She is currently the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition and Advisor to the Director at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yaron Tsur</span>

Yaron Tsur, an historian of the Jews in the Muslim lands in the modern era, is amongst the founders of the Open University of Israel, a professor in the department of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University and a former chairperson of its graduate school of Jewish studies. He is a pioneer in the field of Digital Humanities in Israel and the founder of the "Historical jewish press" website.

Haim Beinart (1917–2010) was an Israeli historian and academic administrator. Originally from Russia, he was a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He served as the dean of humanities at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He specialized in the history of Iberian Jews.

Gershon David Hundert is a Canadian historian of Early Modern Polish Jewry and Leanor Segal Professor at McGill University.

Abraham "Addi" Wasserstein was a German-born British and Israeli classicist, a professor of classics at the University of Leicester in the UK and then at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

References

  1. "Bernard Wasserstein." Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2013. In Context: Biography. GALE|H1000115288. Retrieved on November 26, 2020.
  2. "Bernard Wasserstein." Harriet & Ulrich E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Modern European Jewish History and the College. The University of Chicago, Department of History. Archived from the original. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
  3. "Bernard (Mano Julius) Wasserstein." The Writers Directory, St. James Press, 2018. Gale In Context: Biography. GALE|K1649565224. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
  4. "Bernard Wasserstein." University of Chicago News . Archived from the original. Retrieved November 26, 2020.
  5. Pye, Lucian W. Review of Secret War in Shanghai by Bernard Wasserstein. Foreign Affairs , Vol. 79, No. 2, March/April 2000, pp. 175-176. JSTOR   20049704. doi : 10.2307/20049704. Archived from the original.