Barry Trachtenberg

Bio

I am a historian of modern European and American Jewry, teaching classes on the Nazi Holocaust and Jewish responses to it, as well as classes on the history of Zionism, American Jewry, and other topics related to the modern Jewish past.

My most recent book is The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers University Press, 2022), a work that demonstrates how Yiddish cultural and intellectual activists responded to the hopes, traumas, and triumphs of the middle decades of the twentieth century, when they went from achieving their greatest accomplishments to suffering their most profound losses, and then sought to chart a new path forward to the future.

I am the author of two additional books. The United States and the Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) brings students of the Holocaust a new understanding of this complex and often controversial topic. It demonstrates that the United States’s response to the Holocaust was (and remains) intricately linked to the ever-shifting racial, economic, and social status of American Jewry. The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse University Press, 2008) examines the impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution on the formation of Yiddish scholarship.

Along with being a member of the Wake Forest program in Jewish Studies, I serve on the Board of Scholars of Facing History and Ourselves. For six years I was a member of the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. I am a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.

I also write occasional pieces and lecture on the topics of Zionism, antisemitism, and US support for Israel. These have appeared in forums such as the Forward, Tablet, Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Die Tageszeitung (German), A2larm (Czech), and La Razón (Spanish). In 2017, I testified to the US Congress on the topic of antisemitism on college and university classrooms. In 2023, I submitted with colleagues expert testimony on a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights seeking an emergency order to stop military and diplomatic support for Israeli government’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

For more information or links to my essays and articles, please see https://wfu.academia.edu/BarryTrachtenberg.

Background

Please click here to view my cv