Bernard Wasserstein

Born in London, Bernard Wasserstein received his B.A. from Balliol College, Oxford University, in 1969, and his M.A. (1972), D.Phil. (1974), and D.Litt. (2001) from Nuffield College, Oxford. Before taking up an appointment as Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago in 2003, Mr. Wasserstein taught at the University of Sheffield, Brandeis University, and the University of Glasgow, among other institutions.  In addition, he has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem; All Souls College, Oxford;  and the Sackler Institute for Advanced Studies, Tel Aviv.   He has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. From 1996 to 2000, he was president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and Fellow of St. Cross College.

Among his publications are Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford UP, 1979); The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Yale UP, 1988), which received the Golden Dagger Prize for Nonfiction from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain; Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford UP, 1992); Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, and Harvard UP, 1996), which has been translated into Dutch, German, French, and Romanian; and Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford UP, 2007).

In addition to a study of European Jewish intellectuals in the period after 1945 that he took up as a Guggenheim Fellow, Bernard Wasserstein is also currently working on a book on the Jews in Europe on the eve of the Second World War and a micro-historical study of the relations of Jews with their neighbours in a small Polish town, Krakowiec, over the period 1772 to 1946.