Document Actions

You are here: FRIAS Fellows Fellows 2021/22 Prof. Dr. Benjamin Nathans

Prof. Dr. Benjamin Nathans

University of Pennsylvania
History

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
March 2022 - June 2022

Room 02 022
Phone +49 (0) 761-203 97396
Fax +49 (0) 761-203 97451

CV

Employment

  • Current: Alan Charles Kors Associate Prof. of History, Univ. of Pennsylvania

  • 2008-12 Chair of Content Committee, Ralph Appelbaum Associates (New York), a museum design firm hired to create the Jewish Museum in Moscow

  • Spring 2010 Professeur invité, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
  • 1998-2003 Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
  • 1995-98 Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Indiana University
  • 1992-95 Teaching Fellow, Program in History & Literature, Harvard University
  • 1985 Research Assistant, Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestags
    (Research Service of the West German Parliament), Bonn

Education

  • 1987-95 University of California at Berkeley, M.A. (1989), Ph.D. (1995) in History Summer, 1989 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

  • Spring, 1987 Leningrad State University, USSR

  • 1984-85  Universität Tübingen, Germany

  • 1980-84 Yale University, B.A. in History (1984)

Selected Publications

  • “The Real Power of Putin,” New York Review of Books vol. 63, no. 14 (Sept. 29, 2016): 88-92
  • “Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs,” Journal of Modern History 87 (September 2015):579-614
  • “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 166-190
  • Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia, 2008) 323 pp. Co-edited with Gabriella Safran.
  • Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: 2002; ppb 2004) 426 pp. [Russian: 2007; Hebrew: 2013]

FRIAS Research Projec

Introduction, Commentary, and Scholarly Annotations to the first English translation of Simon Dubnow’s three-volume autobiography The Book of Life: Memoirs and ReflectionsMaterials for the History of My Time (1934-40)

Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) is one of the most influential historians of modern Jewry. He transformed not only what we know about the Jewish past, but the way we understand what constitutes “history” for a diasporic people. In the Russian empire, home to the majority of the world’s Jews, Dubnow was not just a well-known historian but an engaged public intellectual and founder of a liberal political party. His best-selling works radically recast the Jewish past and its relevance for the present. Less well-known is Dubnow’s magisterial autobiography, The Book of Life. Published in Latvia between 1934 and 1940, while Dubnow was in exile from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, these three volumes take readers on a deeply personal journey through nearly a century of upheaval for Russia’s Jews and for Russia itself. I will spend the four months at FRIAS preparing a scholarly introduction, commentary, and roughly one thousand annotations for the first English translation of the autobiography. My goals are to investigate Dubnow’s controversial conception of Jewish history as world history and to situate The Book of Life within the practices of 20th-century autobiographical narrative.