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People

Jonathan Skolnik

Assistant Professor of German & Scandinavian Studies
Graduate Program Director
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor of History

Contact Information

Location: Herter Hall 522
Phone: (413) 545-4245
Email: jskolnik@german.umass.edu

Research Interests

German-Jewish literature and culture, 19th- and 20th-century literature, exile film, intellectual history

Relevant Links

Association for Jewish Studies
German Studies Association

Education

Ph.D. 1999, Columbia University
M.A. 1994, Columbia University
B.A. 1990, Columbia College

Current and Recent Courses

German 323: Modern German History
German 370: 19th Century German Thought: “Radical Subjectivity”
German 391K: Franz Kafka
German 597J: Jews and German Culture

Selected Publications

• “Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration, and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Ross Brann and Adam Sutcliffe, eds., Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From al-Andalus to the Haskalah (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
• “Le juif errant et le temps historique: images littéraires des temps modernes” in Le témoin du temps. Images du juif errant, edited by Richard I. Cohen (Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 2002): 240-50.
• “Writing Jewish History in the Margins of the Weimar Classics: Minority Culture and National Identity in Germany, 1837-1873,” in Nicholas Vazsonyi, ed. Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750-1871 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000).
• “Kaddish for Spinoza: Memory and Modernity in Heine and Celan,” New German Critique 77 (1999), 169-86.
• “Russian Jews in Today’s Germany: End of the Journey?” European Judaism 31:2 (Fall 1998), 30-44.
• “Dissimilation and the Historical Novel: Herman Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez,” Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 43 (1998), 225-40.

Selected Presentations

• “Class War, Anti-Fascism, and Anti-Semitism: Grigori Roshal’s 1939 Film Semya Oppenheim in Context,” Feuchtwanger and Film, University of Southern California and Villa Aurora, September 5, 2007
• “A Song in the Desert? Else Lasker-Schüler and Jewish Modernism in Berlin,” German-Jewish Women Writers, 1900-1938, Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, May 17, 2007
• “’Two must have got hanged together…’ Mimesis, Race, and Antisemitism in German Exile Film, Virginia Commonwealth University, February 5, 2007.
• “African Americans and German Jews in Hollywood, 1933-1965,” Immigration and Cultural Exchange: German Jewish Presences in the US and Post Cold War Germany 27 March, 2007, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, NYU, and Leo Baeck Institute, New York
  How Hollywood Stages Civil Rights: A Comparison of the films Nothing But A Man and Mississippi Burning, Black History Month panel discussion moderated by Jack White, Virginia Commonwealth University, February 16, 2007.
• “A Song in the Desert? Else Lasker-Schüler and Jewish Modernism in Berlin,” 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, San Diego, California, December 17-19, 2006.
• “In the Shadows of the German-Jewish ‘Love Affair’: Kurt Maetzig’s 1947 Film Ehe im Schatten,” German Studies Association, September 29, 2006.
  “Exile on 125th Street: Germans, Jews, and African-Americans in Moon Over Harlem,” DISCOVERING EDGAR G. ULMER: EUROPEAN/AMERICAN FILMMAKER, Sept. 14, 2006. Palacký University of Olomouc, Czech Republic.