Faculty

Alexander (Ari) Joskowicz
Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and European Studies
Affiliated Assistant Professor of History

PhD, University of Chicago, 2008

Jewish History; Modern European History, with a focus on Germany and France; Minorities and Nationalism; Political and Intellectual History

Telephone: 615-322-7371
Email:  a.joskowicz@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: TBA in August
Office: 142 Buttrick Hall

Ari Joskowicz is a historian of modern Jewish and European history. He is especially interested in the interplay between Jewish history, secularization, and transnational minority politics since the Enlightenment. In his current book project, he explores how German and French Jews defined their own modernity and national belonging by criticizing the anti-modern politics of the Catholic Church. His dissertation, which forms the basis of this project, explored the development of this Jewish criticism in Germany and France, starting with the statements of Jewish authors in the late eighteenth century and concluding with the debates surrounding the separation of Church and State in France in 1905. His publications include: “Liberal Judaism and Confessional Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf” in the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (2005), “Heinrich Heine’s Transparent Masks: Denominational Politics and the Poetics of Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Germany and France,”  in the German Studies Review (2011),  and “The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family: Gender and Conversion Fears in 1840s France,”  in the Jewish Quarterly Review (2011). He is currently co-editing a volume on secularism and Jewish studies.

His interest in the history of European minorities is also reflected in various other scholarly projects. He published two book chapters on the politics of remembrance ceremonies in 1950s Austria and contributed to two EU studies on racism and antisemitism in contemporary Europe, including “Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003” for the EUMC (today's European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). Together with Stefan Nowotny, he translated of G. C. Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” into German (Vienna, 2007). He has been awarded fellowships from the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), the Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Simon-Dubnow Institute (Leipzig), and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.

At Vanderbilt, Professor Joskowicz teaches courses in modern European and Jewish history, including “The Holocaust,” “The Idea of Europe,” “Religion and Politics in Modern Europe,” and “Perspectives on Modern Jewish History.”