“From Metaphor to Place: Jewish Perceptions of the "Ghetto," 1933-1953”
Professional Background
Dr. Daniel Schwartz is currently Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University, District of Columbia, where he is also Director of the Judaic Studies Program. He holds a PhD, MPhil, and MA in history from Columbia University in New York. As the Sosland Fellow, at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Schwartz will be conducting research for his project “From Metaphor to Place: Jewish Perceptions of the "Ghetto," 1933-1953.”
Dr. Schwartz is fluent in Hebrew, German, and French. He also has reading skills in Yiddish and Italian.
Dr. Schwartz is the author of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton, 2012), which was a co-winner of the American Academy for Jewish Research’s Salo W. Baron prize, awarded annually to the best first book in Jewish studies, and was also a National Jewish Book Award finalist in the category of history. He currently has two books under contract, “Ghetto”: A History (Harvard University Press) and Spinoza in Modern Jewish Thought and Culture: A Reader (Brandeis University Press). Dr. Schwartz is the author of several book chapters, articles, and lectures. In 2016, Dr. Schwartz presented his paper, “The Ghetto in the Modern Jewish Imagination,” at a conference he co-organized at the Center for Jewish History in New York entitled The Ghetto and Beyond: Italian Jews in the Age of the Medici. He has also been the recipient of several fellowships and awards throughout his career.
Fellowship Research
While in residence at the Mandel Center, Dr. Schwartz initiated research to discover to what extent inherited ideas about “ghettos,” derived from the Jewish historical experience, informed Jewish perceptions of their ghettoization under the Nazis. Drawing on the Museum's resources, he sought to explain how Jews turned to the idea of the ghetto to make sense of the upsurge of antisemitism in the 1930s, assess the variety of rhetorical framings of the ghetto, and examine the beginning of the representation of the ghetto experience in Jewish historical memory.
Dr. Schwartz was in residence from January 1 to August 31, 2018.