About us

The online portal ‘[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora’ is published by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ) in Potsdam and supervised by the project team there. It is part of the collaborative portal on European-Jewish history ‘Jewish History online’ hosted at the MMZ, and complements the Leo Baeck Institute’s anthology in the book series on ‘Modern German-Jewish History,’ which is expected to be published in early 2027.

Portal Team

Daniel Burckhardt, M.A. (Technical Implementation)

has been a Research Associate at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam since 2021, where he is responsible for the technical implementation of the online source portal ‘[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora’ among other tasks. Previously, he was the technical developer for the “Key Documents on German-Jewish History” at the Institute for the History of German Jews (IGdJ). He studied in Zurich and Berlin and worked as a Research Associate at the Institute for the Historical Sciences, Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF), and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of H-Soz-Kult.

Dr. Lisa Sophie Gebhard (Coordination and Editor)
is a historian and Research Associate at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, where she coordinates the international publication project ‘[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora.’ She studied in Berlin, Jerusalem, Kiel and Milan and received her doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 2022. Her dissertation, which focuses on the multifaceted lifework of Davis Trietsch, an early Zionist, was funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and published in the Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts. Prior to joining the MMZ she worked at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the German Historical Museum, and Hentrich&Hentrich Verlag für jüdische Kultur und Zeitgeschichte. She lives with her family in Berlin.

Verena Kurz, M.A. (Editor)
has been an external research assistant in the publication project ‘[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora’ at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam since 2024. She studied Cultural Studies, Spanish Philology and Latin American Studies in Potsdam and Berlin. Study and research stays, supported by DAAD scholarships, took her to Argentina, Bolivia and Spain. In Buenos Aires, she headed the Liaison Office of the University of Potsdam and worked in a historical archive to document the ‘anti-fascist’ founding history of the Pestalozzi School.

Paul-Levi Mydlach (Editorial Assistant)
is a student assistant at the Moses Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam. He is studying history and German studies at the University of Potsdam, specializing in German-Jewish history and literature.

Prof. Dr. Miriam Rürup (Project Leader)
has been Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam since 2020. As Head of the Academic Working Group of the Leo Baeck Institute in Germany (WAG), she leads the conceptual design of the book project and online portal “[Hi]stories of the German-Jewish Diaspora.” She was previously Director of the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg, where she was the initiator and conceptual editor and project manager of the so-called Key Documents Edition.

Translators
Andreas Bredenfeld, Berlin
Jake Schneider, Berlin

Book Publication Team

Authors
Prof. Dr. Michael Brenner
Dr. Sheer Ganor (main author and editor)
Prof. Dr. Marion A. Kaplan
Prof. Dr. Guy Miron
Prof. Dr. Miriam Rürup (main author and editor)

Editors
Dr. Lisa Sophie Gebhard (Coordination and Editor)
Verena Kurz
Paul-Levi Mydlach (Editorial Assistant)

Advisory Board

This hybrid project also receives substantive support from a renowned, international advisory board. It includes academics from the three countries in which the Leo Baeck Institute has been located since 1955, some of whom also contributed to the predecessor volumes German-Jewish History in the Modern Era.

Prof. Ofer Ashkenazi, PhD, Director of the Koebner Minerva Research Center for German History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Prof. Atina Grossmann, PhD, Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City

Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC

Prof. Jeffrey Lesser, PhD, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and Director of the Halle Institute for Global Research and Learning at Emory University, Atlanta

Prof. Michael A. Meyer, PhD, Adolph S. Ochs Professor of Jewish History Emeritus at the Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio

Prof. David Rechter, PhD, Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford

PD Dr. Katrin Steffen, DAAD Professor of European and Jewish History and Culture at the University of Sussex

Sponsor

Since 2023, the VolkswagenStiftung has been funding the realization of the hybrid publication project of the Academic Working Group of the Leo Baeck Institute in Germany (WAG) under the leadership of its chair Prof. Dr. Miriam Rürup at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam.