Barry Trachtenberg

Last updated

Barry Trachtenberg is an American historian and professor, currently holding the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University. [1] As a Jewish scholar specializing in Jewish history, Trachtenberg has been an outspoken critic of both American support for Israel and Israeli policies. [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Education and career

Trachtenberg is originally from Newington, Connecticut. His parents were a salesman and a receptionist, and he was educated in the local public school system. [5] He is a 1991 graduate of Glassboro State College (now Rowan University). After earning a master's degree at the University of Vermont and a postgraduate diploma from the University of Oxford's Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, he completed a Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of California, Los Angeles. [6]

After lecturing at the University at Albany, SUNY in 2003, he obtained an assistant professorship there in 2004, and was promoted to associate professor in 2010. He moved to Wake Forest in 2016 as associate professor and Michael R. & Deborah K. Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History; [7] in 2023 he was promoted to full professor. He directed the programs in Judaic Studies and Hebrew Studies at the University at Albany from 2010 to 2016, and the Jewish Studies Program at Wake Forest from 2017 to 2020. [6] [8]

Books

Trachtenberg has authored several academic books including The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (2008), [9] [10] The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (2018), [11] [12] and The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (2022), [13] contributing to the academic discourse on Jewish history. [14]

Related Research Articles

<i>The Black Book of Soviet Jewry</i> 1944 Russian-language compilation by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman

The Black Book of Soviet Jewry or simply The Black Book, also known as The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, is a 500-page document compiled for publication by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman originally in late 1944 in the Russian language. It was a result of the collaborative effort by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and members of the American Jewish community to document the anti-Jewish crimes of the Holocaust and the participation of Jews in the resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II. The 1991 Kyiv edition of The Black Book was subtitled The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the German Nazi Death Camps established on occupied Polish soil during the War 1941–1945.

Trachtenberg (Russian/Ukrainian: Трахтенберг, Yiddish: טראַכֿטנבערג; Hebrew: טרכטנברג, is a surname of several notable people, typically an Ashkenazi Jewish surname, especially Bessarabian and Ukrainian. Sometimes the name is transliterated to Trachtenburg, whilst Jews from Argentina often spell the name Trajtenberg according to Spanish spelling norms. Some more recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union have had the name transliterated as Trakhtenberg when entering the US.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uri Zvi Greenberg</span> Israeli poet and politician (1896–1981)

Uri Zvi Greenberg was an Israeli poet, journalist and politician who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew.

<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.

María Rosa Menocal was a Cuban-born scholar of medieval culture and history and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She later went on to win the Mellon and Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities for her work in medieval history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John S. Conway (historian)</span>

John Seymour Conway was Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia, where he taught for almost 40 years. His work focused on the role of the Vatican and German churches during the Holocaust; on 20th-century Christian–Jewish relations; and on the Holocaust in Hungary and Slovakia.

Holocaust trivialization refers to any comparison or analogy that diminishes the scale and severity of the atrocities that were carried out by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The Wiesel Commission defined trivialization as the abusive use of comparisons with the aim of minimizing the Holocaust and banalizing its atrocities. Originally, holocaust meant a type of sacrifice that is completely burnt to ashes; starting from the late 19th century, it started to denote extensive destruction of a group, usually people or animals. The 1915 Armenian genocide was described as a "holocaust" by contemporary observers.

Gender and Jewish Studies is an emerging subfield at the intersection of gender studies, queer studies, and Jewish studies. Gender studies centers on interdisciplinary research on the phenomenon of gender. It focuses on cultural representations of gender and people's lived experience. Similarly, queer studies focuses on the cultural representations and lived experiences of queer identities to critique hetero-normative values of sex and sexuality. Jewish studies is a field that looks at Jews and Judaism, through such disciplines as history, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics, and sociology. As such, scholars of gender and Jewish studies are considering gender as the basis for understanding historical and contemporary Jewish societies. This field recognizes that much of recorded Jewish history and academic writing is told from the perspective of “the male Jew” and fails to accurately represent the diverse experiences of Jews with non-dominant gender identities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Wisse</span> Canadian scholar of Yiddish literature

Ruth Wisse is a Canadian academic and is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University emerita. She is a noted scholar of Yiddish literature and of Jewish history and culture.

<i>Buried by the Times</i> Book by Laurel Leff

Buried by the Times is a 2005 book by Laurel Leff.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Israel Gutman</span> 20th and 21st-century Israeli historian and Holocaust survivor

Israel Gutman was a Polish-born Israeli historian and a survivor of the Holocaust.

Debórah Dwork is an American historian, specializing in the history of the Holocaust. She is the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and formerly served as the Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dovid Katz</span> American Yiddish scholar and historian

Dovid Katz is an American-born Vilnius-based scholar, author, and educator specializing in Yiddish language and literature, Lithuanian-Jewish culture, and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. In recent years, he has been known for combating the so-called "Double Genocide" revision of Holocaust history which asserts a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He is editor of the web journal Defending History which he founded in 2009. He is known to spend part of each year at his home in North Wales. His website includes a list of his books, of some articles by topic, a record of recent work, and a more comprehensive bibliography.

Holocaust studies, or sometimes Holocaust research, is a scholarly discipline that encompasses the historical research and study of the Holocaust. Institutions dedicated to Holocaust research investigate the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of Holocaust methodology, demography, sociology, and psychology. It also covers the study of Nazi Germany, World War II, Jewish history, antisemitism, religion, Christian-Jewish relations, Holocaust theology, ethics, social responsibility, and genocide on a global scale. Exploring trauma, memories, and testimonies of the experiences of Holocaust survivors, human rights, international relations, Jewish life, Judaism, and Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust world are also covered in this type of research.

The Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards were a Canadian program of literary awards, managed, produced and presented annually by the Koffler Centre of the Arts to works judged to be the year's best works of literature by Jewish Canadian writers or on Jewish cultural and historical topics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Jewish Labor Bund</span> Jewish socialist organization

The International Jewish Labor Bund (ILJB) was a New York-based international Jewish socialist organization, based on the legacy of the General Jewish Labour Bund founded in the Russian empire in 1897 and the Polish Bund that was active in the interwar years. The IJLB is composed by local Bundist groups around the world and was originally created to defend Jewish national-cultural rights in Eastern Europe. It was an "associated organization" of the Socialist International, similar in status to the World Labour Zionist Movement or the International League of Religious Socialists. Bundist ideology differed significantly from Zionist beliefs regarding the Yiddish language and the immigration of Jews. In the mid-2000s, The World Coordinating Committee of the Jewish Labor Bund was dissolved in New York, although local Bundist groups or groups inspired by the Jewish Labor Bund still exist in Mexico and Australia.

Livia Rothkirchen was a Czechoslovak-born Israeli historian and archivist. She was the author of several books about the Holocaust, including The Destruction of Slovak Jewry (1961), the first authoritative description of the deportation and murder of the Jews of Slovakia.

<i>"What! Still Alive?!"</i> 2017 book by Monika Rice

"What! Still Alive?!": Jewish Survivors in Poland and Israel Remember Homecoming is a 2017 book by historian Monika Rice that deals with the memories of Jewish Holocaust survivors of their first encounters with ethnic Poles after liberation from Nazi German rule. The testimonies were all found in archives at Yad Vashem and the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.

Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leah Garrett</span> American researcher and writer

Leah Garrett is a professor and "Larry and Klara Silverstein Chair in Jewish Studies" and Director of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, at Hunter College, City University of New York.

References

  1. ↑ "Barry Trachtenberg – Department of History" . Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  2. ↑ "The New Kherem, or 'Barry Trachtenberg Does Not Represent Us!': On speaking for and against Jewish self-interests". Mondoweiss. 2020-05-04. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  3. ↑ https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jewish-studies-professor-to-congress-no-anti-semitism-on-college-campuses-nothing-wrong-with-comparing-israel-to-nazis
  4. ↑ Younes, Ali. "Critics call Israel's nation-state law 'provocative and racist'". Al Jazeera. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  5. ↑ ""A Genuine Gift": Barry Trachtenberg ('91) Remembers Days of Activism and Growth". Rowan University. Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  6. 1 2 "Curriculum vitae" . Retrieved 2024-05-05.
  7. ↑ https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20171107/106610/HHRG-115-JU00-Wstate-TrachtenbergB-20171107.pdf
  8. ↑ "Trachtenberg, Barry". Wake Forest News. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  9. ↑ Trachtenberg, Barry (2008). The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917. Syracuse University Press. ISBN   978-0-8156-5136-9.
  10. ↑ Reviews of The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish:
  11. ↑ Trachtenberg, Barry (2018). The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN   978-1-4725-6720-8.
  12. ↑ Reviews of The United States and the Nazi Holocaust:
  13. ↑ Trachtenberg, Barry (2022). The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye. Rutgers University Press. ISBN   978-1-9788-2549-9.
  14. ↑ Reviews of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish:
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.