Dr. Anne-Christin Klotz

Professional Background

Anne-Christin Klotz received her PhD from the Institute of Eastern European Studies at the Free University Berlin for her dissertation, “Together Against Germany: Warsaw’s Yiddish Daily Press and its Fight against National Socialism, 1930–1941.” She is currently a Martin Buber postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is working on a study of Eastern European Jewish survivor landsmanshaftn as a means of migrant self-help and on an interdisciplinary interview project documenting antisemitism from a Jewish perspective in Germany.

Dr. Klotz received the Irma Rosenberg Award in Researching the History of National Socialism 2022 (Vienna) and the Marko Feingold Prize in Jewish Studies 2022 (Austria). She was also one of the finalists for the Yad Vashem Book Prize 2023. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a research assistant at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Dr. Klotz was also awarded fellowships from numerous prestigious institutions, including the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (a Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies), Yad Vashem, and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.  Before she began her doctoral studies, she was a student researcher on the 16-volume publication series, The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. Dr. Klotz also volunteered in the education department at the Stutthof concentration camp memorial site in Poland. 

Fellowship Research

Anne-Christin Klotz was awarded the Matthew Family Fellowship for her research project “Landsmanshaftn as a Means of migrant Self-help and Communities of Mourning: A Transnational History of Eastern European Jewish Hometown Associations during and after the Shoah.” Her study draws on various archival resources, including newspapers, magazines, diaries, private and official letters, yizkor books, and oral interviews from around the world. She seeks to explore the changing roles and functions of landsmanshaftn with special regard to their local and global contexts and networks. Through an actor-centered perspective that highlights the agency of the refugees and survivors and their prewar networks, her project aims to examine four relevant topics in the context of global Jewish history, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Yiddish culture and memory politics: (1) transnational Jewish self-help practices in various aspects of life, (2) the rescue and preservation of a secular Yiddish culture after the Shoah in postwar Europe and beyond, (3) the development of strategies in the context of grief and early Shoah remembrance through survivor landsmanshaftn as communities of mourning. Finally (4), the project explores the dynamics of various forms of transnational relations between the new centers of the Jewish world in Palestine/Israel and the United States and the former Jewish centers in Eastern Europe, all in the context of the Cold War and through the lens of landsmanshaftn.

The fellowship allows Dr. Klotz access to the Museum’s rich archival collections, such as the materials from the landsmanshaftn department of the centrally Komitet Żydów Polskich, the records of the Jewish Labor Committee, various oral history collections, photographs, and the published materials in the library, which holds copies of several critical Yiddish books and newspapers.

Residency Period: September 1, 2024–December 31, 2024