“Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in the ‘Orient’”
Professional Background
Dr. Atina Grossmann is a professor of history at the Cooper Union in New York City, where she teaches courses on global history, modern Europe, fascism and National Socialism, the Holocaust, refugees and migration in a transnational context, and gender and sexuality studies. Dr. Grossmann’s previous research has focused on the history of women, feminism, sexual politics, and population policy in Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Germany. She has published numerous articles on the “new woman” in interwar Germany, including her book, Reforming Sex: Birth Control and Abortion Reform in Germany (Oxford 1995).
Dr. Grossmann’s additional publications include Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007, German 2012); Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and with Tamar Lewinsky, the section “1945-1949” in A History of Jews in Germany Since 1945 (Indiana 2018, German 2012) ed. Michael Brenner; and co-editor, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (with A.Patt, L.Levi, M. Mandel, 2019), and Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020), and “Holocaust Studies in Our Age of Catastrophe,” Journal of Holocaust Research 35:2 (April 2021). Dr. Grossmann is currently completing an annotated document collection on Jewish Displaced Persons in Germany 1945-1949 for the Jewish Source Editions published by the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture—Simon Dubnow, the University of Leipzig (with Avinoam Patt, Tamar Lewinsky, and Alexandra Kramen). Her most recent publication on "Jewish Refugees in Iran and India'' is included in the volume Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt (Bloomsbury 2023).
Dr. Grossmann has received fellowships from the Davis Center at Princeton University, the Mandel Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the German Marshall Fund, ACLS, and the NEH. She also has held guest professorships at the Freidrich Schiller University Jena, the Humboldt University Berlin, and the University of Haifa. Her current professional service includes membership on the academic advisory board of the Fritz Bauer Institute for Holocaust Research and Education in Frankfurt, Germany, and the editorial board of the American Historical Review.
Fellowship Research
As the 2022–2023 Ina Levine Invitational Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Atina Grossmann is working on a book project titled, "Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in the 'Orient.'" This hybrid study involves her parents' experiences as refugees from Nazi Germany in Iran and India juxtaposed to a general investigation of European Jewish refugees' encounters with multicultural local populations and authorities in colonial and quasi-colonial spaces from the 1930s through 1948. She is particularly interested in the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship that illuminate current vexed debates about the connections among antisemitism, racism, colonialism, and the Holocaust, as well as the transnational circulation of information and emotions among Jewish refugees in a global diaspora from Central Europe and those who had been left behind under Nazi control.