Jeffrey C. Herf

Jeffrey Herf studies the intersection of ideas and politics in modern Europe, particularly Germany. He received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1981 after receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969. In spring 2014, on the basis of his scholarship, the University of Maryland, College Park awarded him the status of Distinguished University Professor.

He has published eight, two edited volumes, and a collection of his own essays. His first book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge UP,1984) examines the paradoxical embrace of modern technology among ideologues of the anti-democratic right who rejected the Enlightenment in the decade following World War I, and then in the leadership of Nazi regime. It has been published in French, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish translations. This was followed by War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (Free Press, 1991), which explores the interaction of democracy and dictatorship in light of the evolution of political ideas in West Germany since the 1960s. 

Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard UP, 1997) offers a comparative historical examination of what political leaders in West and East Germany said and did not say about the Holocaust, beginning with their views during the Nazi era, in the years of Allied occupation, from 1949 to 1989 during the Cold War, and in unified Germany after 1991. It received the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for 1998, and a German-language edition was published in September 1998 by Ullstein/Propylaen Verlag in Berlin as Zweierlei Erinnerung: Die NS-Vergangenheit im Geteilten Deutschland. 

The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard UP, 2006) draws on public and archival material to examine the Nazis’ central antisemitic conspiracy theory, one that accused “international Jewry” of waging war on Germany and thus justified “the Final Solution” as an act of national self-defense. It received the National Jewish Book Award for 2006 in the category of works on the Holocaust. It has been published in Chinese, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish translations. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale UP, 2009), was awarded the 2011 bi-annual Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Prize of the German Studies Association for work on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in 2009 and 2010, as well as the Bronze Book Prize of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It has been published in French, Italian, and Japanese editions. In 2007, he edited Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence (Routledge and Taylor and Francis, 2007), a collection of essays by scholars from the United States, Europe and Israel. 

Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge UP, 2016) examines both the East German government antagonism to the state of Israel that evolved from hostile propaganda and diplomatic offensives to military support to the Arab states and the Palestinian terror organizations, as well as the development of an anti-Zionist West German radical left that also included collaboration with those organizations. The German translation, Unerklärte Kriegegegen Israel: Die DDR und die westdeutsche Linke, 1967-1989, was published by Wallstein publishers in Göttingen in 2019. In 2017, with Anthony McElligott, he co-edited Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (Palgrave/Macmillan), a collection of essays by scholars from the Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel and the United States that focused on antisemitism from right-wing, left-wing, and Islamist sources since the Holocaust.

Israel’s Moment: International Support and Opposition for Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949, (Cambridge UP, 2022) received the Bernard Lewis Prize from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for 2022. It examines debates in the United States, Britain, France and at the United Nations to recall political coordinates very different from those of recent decades. The strongest support for the Zionist project then came from liberals, and leftists in Western Europe and the United States, and the Soviet Union and Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in particular. In addition to the opposition by the Arab states and representatives of the Palestine Arabs, opposition was entrenched in the British Foreign Office, and the U.S. State Department. 

Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist (Routledge, 2024) is a collection of essays that draws Jeffrey Herf’s preceding work on the subject and includes essays of political commentary about antisemitism in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  Drei Gesichter des Antisemitismus: Rechts, Links, und Islamistisch, (Hentrich und Hentrich, 2024) is an expanded German-language edition.

Professor Herf has received numerous fellowships from, among other institutions: the German Academic Exchange; National Endowment for the Humanities; National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation; Bradley Foundation; German Marshall Fund; German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.; School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Fulbright Visiting Professor, Freiburg University; Max Planck Gesellschaft, Germany; American Academy in Berlin; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Yitzak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, Tel Aviv University. 

He has taught courses on European History Since the Renaissance and Reformation; Twentieth-Century Europe; A History of Antisemitism: Classic, Modern, and New; Nazi Germany; Europe since 1939; Ideas and Politics in Europe since 1900; German History since 1900; and Democracy and Dictatorship in Modern German History. He has advised seventeen doctoral dissertations. 

Professor Herf was a contributing editor to Partisan Review and has been a member of the editorial boards of Central European History, Antisemitism Studies, and the Journal of Israeli History. He has contributed several hundred scholarly articles, book reviews, and chapters in edited volumes, as well as book reviews, and essays on contemporary history in American Interest, American Purpose/Persuasion, Commentary, Quillette, National Interest, Partisan Review, The Free Press, Washington Post, Times of Israel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Internationale Politik, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, and Die Zeit. 

Currently, he is co-editing, with Jonathan Brent, a collection entitled “Necessary Dissent: Essays on Israel, Hamas, and October 7.” His research-in-progress is a study of the German government’s response to Islamism since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, and then in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.