Dr. Jonathan Skolnik

Professional Background

Dr. Jonathan Skolnik is Assistant Professor of German and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received a PhD and master’s degree in Germanic languages from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in history from Columbia College. For his Sosland Foundation Fellowship, he conducted research for his project “The Terms of Dissimilation.”

Dr. Skolnik’s publications include a chapter titled “28 May 1942: Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang Collaborate on a Screenplay” in the forthcoming A New History of German Cinema edited by Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson and “The Strange Career of the Abarbanel Clan: German-Jewish Sephardism from Heine to the Holocaust” in the forthcoming Sephardism: Spanish/Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination edited by Yael Halevi-Wise. He is writing two books, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions. History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1953 and Two must have got hanged together...German Exiles, Hollywood, and Race in America. He co-edited New German Critique 77 and translated source documents for the German Historical Institute’s German History in Documents and Images project. He has presented several papers at conferences on topics relating to the fields of Germanic and Judaic studies and has received fellowships from the Leo Baeck Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. He is skilled in German, French, and Yiddish.

Fellowship Research

During his tenure at the Center, Dr. Skolnik researched “dissimilation” in the 1930s, exploring both communal and individual examples of German-Jewish cultural responses to National Socialism from 1933 to 1939.

Dr. Jonathan Skolnik was in residence at the Mandel Center from October 1, 2011 to March 30, 2012.