Karen Auerbach - School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies
Position
Kronhill Lecturer in East European Jewish History
Phone
61-3-9903 5007
Address
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies
Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation
Building 11
Monash University Victoria 3800
Australia
Location
Building H, 8th Floor, Caulfield Campus
Personal History
Karen Auerbach is the Kronhill Lecturer in East European Jewish History in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation in the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies. She completed her Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 2009. Most recently she was a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. She has also held teaching positions at the University of Southampton in England and at Brown and Virginia Tech universities in the United States as well as research positions at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Current Research
Karen's research expertise is in Polish Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust. She is completing a book titled "A Window on Warsaw: The Jewish Families of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue after the Holocaust," which is a microhistory of Jewish integration in postwar Poland focusing on ten families who were neighbors in an apartment building in Warsaw. Her current research focuses on Jewish booksellers and publishers of Polish literature in nineteenth-century Warsaw. She is also completing a secondary project examining the spread of information among Jews within Nazi-occupied Europe during the earliest stages of the Holocaust in 1941 and 1942. Previous to her doctoral studies, Karen published numerous articles in the New York-based Forward newspaper about Jewish life in contemporary Poland.
Major Publications
A Window on Warsaw: The Jewish Families of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue after the Holocaust. Under contract with Indiana University Press.
"Integration and Its Obstacles in Postwar Poland: The Case of the Jewish Parents of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue." In Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 24. Forthcoming in October 2011.
"Memory of the Holocaust in Recent Polish Historiography." In Association for Jewish Studies Review 35.1. April 2011.
"Insiders-Outsiders: Poles and Jews in Recent Polish-Jewish Fiction and Autobiography." Co-author with Antony Polonsky. In Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, edited by Richard Cohen, Jonathan Frankel and Stefani Hoffman, 2010.
"The Jewish Families of 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue in Postwar Warsaw: Ethical Dilemmas in Research on Assimilation in People's Poland." In The Jewish Community in Poland Before and After the 1967-1968 Anti-Semitic Campaign. In Polish. Warsaw, 2009.
"The Fate of a Yiddish Writer in Communist Eastern Europe: The Case of Naftali Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965." In Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 21, 2009. Earlier versions of this article were published in Żydzi a Lewica [Jews and the Left], edited by August Grabski, Warsaw, 2007; in Yiddish translation in the New York-based journal Tsukunft, 2007; and in shortened Polish translation in the Warsaw-based journal Midrasz, 2007.
" 'I am an example that it is possible to be both a Pole and a Jew': Polish Jewish Identity and the 1968 Events in Henryk Grynberg's Memorbuch." In Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 19, 2006.
Areas of Research and Supervision
Social and urban history of Jews in modern and early modern Europe, East European and Soviet Jewish history, history of the Holocaust, Jewish life and identity in Europe after the Holocaust, Polish history, everyday life in Communist Eastern Europe.