“The Holocaust and the Invention of Judeo-Christianity in West Germany, 1948-1968”
Professional Background
Dr. Noah Strote is Assistant Professor of 20th Century European History, North Carolina State University (US). He earned his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. He speaks English natively and possesses skills in German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Yiddish. Recent lectures and presentations include: “Islam in the Eyes of Post-War Judeo-Christian Europeans” for the conference Religion and Identity in Europe and Beyond: Between Hybridity and Ethnicity in Ramat Gan, Israel, 2012; “Christians, Jews, and the Foundations of the Federal Republic” at the German Holocaust Institute in Washington, D.C. 2011; and “Bildung before and after Nazism” for the American Historical Society Convention in Boston, 2011. While in residence in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Dr. Strote conducted research on his project entitled “The Holocaust and the Invention of Judeo-Christianity in West Germany.”
Dr. Strote has authored several published articles, including “The Birth of the ‘Psychological Jew’ in an Age of Ethnic Pride” in The New German Critique (2012). He has taught twentieth-century European history at North Carolina State University in Raleigh since July, 2011. Courses taught include: “The Holocaust and After,” “Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,” “Modern Germany since 1871,” and “Religion and Politics in Modern European Thought.”
Fellowship Research
For his Raab Foundation Fellowship Dr. Strote attempted to show the effects of changing attitudes and relationships between Jews and Christians in post-war West Germany. After the Second World War, many Christians and Jews looked around them for explanations of the recent European catastrophe: not only the rise of National Socialism, but also the Cold War that had recently ripped Europe in half. Many reasoned that Germany specifically and Europe as a whole had become too secular, with the decline of religious values creating a vacuum filled by ideologies such as National Socialism and communism. Dr. Strote intended to explain how dialogue between Jews and Christians on the question of secularism underpinned Christian-Jewish reconciliation in West Germany and helped shape West Germans’ understanding of the recent murder of European Jewry.
Dr. Strote was in residence in the Center from October 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.