I grew up in Jerusalem and educated at Tel Aviv University and UC Berkeley. I am broadly
interested in the theory and practice of writing history displayed in particular in
the topics of memory, culture, and nationhood. My work has often taken modern German
history as a point of departure, yet has consistently cast its net wider. As a historian,
I have sought to reach in my work the edges of the historical discipline, those areas
of research and theory where the historical method meets ethnography, literature,
anthropology, and cultural studies. In my writing over the years, I have sought to
craft a narrative weaving together story telling with critical analysis. But in recent
years I have been particularly interested in probing into different possibilities
of historical narration. Among my book publications are The Nation As a Local Metaphor:
Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997) and Germany As
a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (2006). In the last
few years I worked on the Holocaust and wrote Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As
Historical Understanding (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012) and A World
Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale UP, 2014). It
explores the German sensibilities in the Third Reich that underlie the persecution
and extermination of the Jews, making them conceivable and imaginable; the project
was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship.Completing A World Without Jews, I sought a new challenge, in terms of method, sources,
and interpretation, and chose to work on a topic squarely within Jewish and Israeli
history. My current project, Imagining Palestine and Israel, 1948: Jews and Palestinians
between Local Experience and Global History crafts two narratives: one is based on
the experience of Arabs, Jews, and British based on letters, diaries, and oral history,
and the second is placing 1948 within global perspective of decolonization, the break-up
of the British Empire, human rights, and, in particular, modern forced migrations
and partitions. I am the recipient, among others, of grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt,
and Lady Davis Foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University,
the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington, DC.