research overview
- My early research offered a reconsideration of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish violence by analyzing and documenting how state-organized linguistic violence helped to create a political culture in which mass murder became possible. Working within the framework of discourse analysis, I examined the violence of official, antisemitic Nazi government categories and how such linguistic practices preceded, accompanied, and made possible the physical violence against European Jewry. Inevitably, this state-level instigation affected how Jewish community members used language to navigate between their social worlds and identities—and ultimately to fight for their own lives. When conducting research, I was struck by the frequency with which Jews in the Nazi state reached across national borders in support of their often global struggles. My subsequent research, thus, turned to a reconsideration of the spatial terms of analysis that conventional Holocaust historiography had largely limited to the confines of nation-states. My work demonstrates the widespread existence of trans-territorial transfers and even networks, which connected German-Jewish communities not only to co-religionists across Europe, but far beyond the continent. My work al centers on how Jewish émigré newspapers in Asia mediated transnational transfers that aided, but repeatedly also undermined readers’ struggles against persecution. These distinctly transnational dynamics extended to petitioning practices by European Jews. Far from acts carried out in vain, these petitioning practices, my research shows, emerged as pivotal tools to redress grievances and appeal for support in the struggle for survival. Even “failed” entreaties often gave their authors invaluable time to flee or go into hiding. In fact, Jewish Holocaust-era petitions, which numbered in the tens of thousands, underscore the need to reevaluate the very question of European Jewish agency faced with seemingly impossible odds.
