The Stanford Cardinal is about to make a big scholarly splash at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Steven Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue, professors of history and co-directors of Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, were selected for prestigious invitational fellowships at the museum for this year and next. And Holly Case, a 27-year-old doctoral student in history, has won a four-month fellowship to study at the Washington, D.C. center starting in February.
“It obviously speaks very highly of Stanford in terms of the scholarship there,” said Wendy Lower, director of the museum’s visiting scholars program, which this year has granted fellowships to 35 researchers from around the world.
Neither Zipperstein nor Rodrigue specifically study the Holocaust and, unlike Case, neither actually applied for the awards. Their expertise drew the attention of the museum’s academic committee, which invited Zipperstein to study there starting this month and his colleague, starting next fall.
Lower explained that to better understand what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, “we have to piece together what these communities were like on the eve of the Holocaust.”
Zipperstein, whose concentration is on the history of Russian Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries, says it makes sense to explore the existence of Jews before the Holocaust to better grasp its realities.
Apart from memoirs written by survivors, Zipperstein said most scholarly material about the Holocaust is based on archives left by the Germans themselves. Most research is focused on “how Jews were destroyed,” he said. “It’s very difficult to tell history in the eyes of the people being acted upon.”
It’s nonetheless a crucial endeavor, he said.
“In order to understand what happened during the war, you have to understand what is being destroyed,” said the 51-year-old professor, who will study at the museum through January.
During his stay in Washington, Zipperstein plans to pore through museum archives as he works on a book about Eastern European Jews.
He also will deliver lectures to museum researchers and travel to several East Coast universities for speaking engagements.
Rodrigue will spend a full academic year at the museum starting next September. A specialist on Sephardim and modern French Jewry, Rodrigue, 45, described his fellowship as “an absolutely fantastic opportunity.”
He pointed to the chance to conduct research in the museum’s 18-million-page collection of archives and to exchange information with leading Holocaust and Jewish history experts.
In turn, the museum plans to tap into his knowledge of Sephardim for use in their current exhibit and his background on French Jewry for another show scheduled to open two or three years from now.
Case also described her fellowship as “an amazing research opportunity” as she pursues a doctoral thesis that focuses on a day in the life of a Transylvanian town.
Called Cluj, the community of 111,000 was home to about 17,000 Jews. Most of those Jewish occupants were deported and ultimately killed in Auschwitz.
But Case’s interest deals with the atmosphere of the town on May 14, 1942. “I chose that day because I wanted to write a social history of the town that was not determined by the major events” of the Holocaust, she said. She selected Cluj because it was ethnically diverse and an intriguing place to explore questions of Jewish and cultural identity.
Case has traveled to Europe three times to study documents there but says her efforts have been hampered by bureaucratic red tape.
In contrast, studying at the Holocaust museum is “incredibly expedient in terms of research,” says Case, who already has viewed the center’s online catalogue. “It’s absolutely the highest luxury for a researcher to have all that material so close and accessible. It’s amazing.”
Asked to explain the selection of the trio of Stanford scholars, Rodrigue offered this theory: “It recognizes our very diverse range of interest.”
In addition, he said, “It also happens to be a constellation of people in the right place at the right time.”