Guy Miron

Guy Miron
Born	1966
Nationality	American
Citizenship	United States of America
Known for	Historical research of the Jews in Germany and Hungary Holocaust research Jewish historiography
Scientific career
Fields	History
Institutions	Open University in Israel Yad VaShem

Guy Miron (b. 1966) is a professor of history at the Open University of Israel and head of the Center for the Study of German Jewry during the Holocaust at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem. Since October 2019, he serves as Vice President of Academic Affairs at the Open University.

Miron specializes in the history of the Jews in Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Weimar Republic and the Nazi periods. In addition, he has also studied Hungarian Jewry during these periods. His research deals with a variety of aspects of identity and memory, questions of Jewish perceptions and historiographical issues.

Biography

Miron was born in Jerusalem in 1966 and graduated from the Himmelfarb School in Jerusalem. He studied for two years at the Har Etzion yeshiva before and after his military service. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Open University and a master's degree and a doctorate from the Hebrew University. In 2002, he served as a visiting lecturer at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA.

In October 2003, he was appointed a senior lecturer in modern Jewish history at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where he served as dean from 2005 to 2008.

In October 2014, he became an associate professor in the Department of History, Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the Open University and then advanced to the rank of full professor.

Since 1991 he has held various positions at Yad Vashem. Among his duties he has managed international seminars for educators in English and German, developed study materials on the subject of the Holocaust, edited the journal "Legacy" and edited the Encyclopedia of the Ghettos, which was published in English. Since 2012, he has been the head of the Center for the Study of German Jewry during the Holocaust at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem.

Since September 2009, he has served as head of the research and publication committee of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem and is currently a member of the institute's board.

In 2019 - 2021 he has served as one of the editors of Zmanim, a historical quarterly in Hebrew.

Books and Research

German Jews In Israel - Memories and Past Images

This book, which is based on Miron's doctoral dissertation and was published in 2005 by Magnes and the R. Koebner Center for German History at Hebrew University, is based on a review and analysis of several dozen autobiographical essays written by Germans in Israel. By examining personal memory patterns of German immigrants, the diverse facets of their self-awareness are revealed and analyzed in the book, highlighting their identity issues as individuals and as a group seeking its place within the emerging Israeli society. In addition, the study compares memoirs written in Eretz Israel and the State of Israel to a variety of memoirs written by German Jews who immigrated to the United States or returned to live in Germany.

The book systematically examines the variety of representations of German Jewish existence in the authors' memoirs: their retrospective attitude to their German homeland, their relations with Christian Germans, their Jewish identity in Germany, and the explanations they attempt to present of the catastrophe that befell German Jews. In a similar way, the complex reflections of their experience in the Land of Israel and the place of German immigrants within it are also examined.

The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary

This book, published in Hebrew (The Zalman Shazar Center, Jerusalem 2011) and English (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2011) deals with memory patterns of the past and the political shaping of memory in three European Jewish communities during the years they faced threats of fascism and the decline of emancipation. The book is based on a broad spectrum of articles published in Jewish community journals of the period.

The starting point for the study is based on the understanding that modern Jewish identity in Germany, France and Hungary was decisively shaped during the nineteenth century on values ​​of emancipation and integration of the Jews within the nation state in which they lived. In each country, patterns of Jewish identification with the nation-state and its culture were formed and solidified also through a historical narrative in which emancipation and progress held a central position.

The chapters of the book deal with the range of ways in which the spokespeople of these communities coped with the decline and sometimes even shattering of the historical reality underlying emancipation and the liberal values involved, through the use of historical narratives and symbols of the past. Naturally, these issues greatly concerned the leaders and voices of the Jews in these communities - expressed in the press, magazines, and popular historical literature. An examination of each community's coping with this crisis encompasses the internal diversity and internal political rifts that characterized it against the background of research findings that deal with questions of representations of the past within the environments of the non-Jewish majority in each of these countries.

Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich

Since 2012, Miron's research has focused on examining the world of German Jews under the Nazi regime. He has written a variety of articles and will soon be published by Magnes in a book summarizing it.

The study, which has utilized a variety of theoretical insights from the social and cultural sciences (environmental psychology, human geography, sociology of time, etc.), examines the "lived time" and "lived space" of German Jews during this period. Based on documentation that includes diaries, correspondence, memoirs and the Jewish press, the study sheds light on basic questions about the ability of Jews to take active initiative (agency) and cope in shaping their self-awareness. Among other things, he deals with the issue of reshaping one’s experience of public space, dealing with the experience of seclusion in one’s home, reorganization of the time circle to the Nazi calendar, and the tension between experiences of waiting through motionless time and accelerated, racing time.

Additional Research

Miron is also involved in the study of Hungarian Jewry, some of his publications on the subject are in collaboration with the Hungarian Jewish literary scholar Dr. Anna Szalai. Among their joint projects, the two collaborated in translating the essay of Hungarian statesman József Eötvös "On the Emancipation of the Jews" (published in Hungarian in 1840, published in Hebrew by the Dinur Center) and in editing a collection of sources on Jewish identity in Hungary - “Jews at the Crossroads: the Jewish Identity Discourse in Hungary between Crisis and Renewal” (Bar Ilan University Press).

Miron has published a number of articles dealing with Jewish historiography in comparative and theoretical contexts. Among his works, his article "Between Berlin and Baghdad", published in the journal Zion in 2006, spoke of the challenge of integrating the historiography of Iraqi Jews and the Middle East in general into the broader historiographical research dealing with the history of Jews in modern times. "Language, Culture, Space", another prominent article published in "Zion" in 2011, deals with the challenges of researching Jewish history in the face of "linguistic turn", "cultural turn" and "spatial turn". Additional articles in historiography have been published in Yad Vashem studies, Iyunim: Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society, and various English journals.

In 2020, Miron served as co-editor with Dr. Scott Ury of Tel Aviv University in publishing a collection of articles "Antisemitism: Historical Concept, Public Discourse" which was published as part of the Zion Journal. The collection, in which more than twenty scholars took part, includes articles on antisemitism in the Middle Ages, discussions on the place of anti-Semitism in Holocaust research and memoirs, and original studies on the phenomena of modern anti-Semitism in the present day.

Bibliography

Books

• German Jews In Israel - Memories and Past Images, Magnes Press, The R. Koebner Center for German History, Jerusalem, 2005
• From Memorial Community to Research Center, the History of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 2005
• The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary, The Zalman Shazar Center, 2011
• Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich, to be published by Magnes Press, the R. Koebner Center for German History, in collaboration with Yad Vashem

Edited Books

• József Eötvös, On the Emancipation of the Jews, editing and translation from Hungarian in collaboration with Dr. Anna Szalai and introduction, Dinur Center Publishing, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003
• Jews at the Crossroads: the Jewish Identity Discourse in Hungary between Crisis and Renewal, joint editing with Anna Szalai, introduction (pp. 13-55) and participation in the translation of sources, "Interpretation and Culture" Series published by Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 2008.
• From Breslau to Jerusalem: Rabbinical Seminaries – Past, Present and Future, published by the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, 2009
• The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2009
• From Berlin to Shanghai: Letters to Israel, Sigmund and Gertrude Hirschberg, Yad Vashem, International School for Holocaust Studies, Jerusalem, 2013
• Jewish Historiography between Past and Future: 200 years of Wissenschaft des Judentums, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Rachel Livneh-Freudenthal, and Guy Miron, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019
• Antisemitism: Historical Concept, Public Discourse, co-edited with Dr. Scott Uyi, Zion, The Israeli Historical Society, 2020

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