Dr. Susanne Hillman

Professional Background

Susanne Hillman earned a Ph.D. in history, with an emphasis on modern Jewish Germany, from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, Wandering Jews: Existential Quests Between Berlin, Zurich, and Zion, focused on Margarete Susman and her circle of fellow Jewish and Christian writers, thinkers, and poets and is currently being revised for publication. Hillman has published in a wide variety of academic journals including The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, The Journal of the History of Ideas, The Journal of Women’s History, Holocaust Studies, and Soundings. After teaching at UC San Diego for several years, Dr. Hillman moved on to San Diego State University where she currently works as a full-time lecturer in the history department and the Jewish studies program. She has presented her ongoing research on Jewish refugees in Harbin, Manchuria in various communal and academic settings. So far, her primary source for her current project has been the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive which holds over 50,000 video testimonies by Holocaust survivors including refugees and witnesses. 

Fellowship Research

Susanne Hillman was awarded a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellowship for her project, “A Global Microhistory of German-Jewish Refugees in Harbin: Integrating East Asian Refugee Communities into the History of the Holocaust.” In this project, she reconstructs the history of the little-known German-Jewish refugee community of Harbin, Manchuria, by focusing on three families. Unlike the Russian-Jewish community in Harbin, which has been the subject of multiple studies, the history of the Harbin refugees has been ignored up to now. Using global microhistory as an analytical framework, Dr. Hillman’s project offers a model for writing the history of the dozens of marginal Jewish refugee communities that began to crop up all over the Global South in the 1930s, not least in East Asia. In examining a group of people and a location not usually associated with the Shoah, this study’s contribution to the history of the Holocaust is two-fold. First, it adds to the recent “Asian turn” in Holocaust studies by acknowledging the geographic reach of forced migration. Second, it problematizes the conventional periodization that locates the beginning of the Holocaust variously at 1933, 1938, or 1941 and, with the exception of histories of displacement, concludes in 1945. For tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, Germany’s surrender did not signify the end of suffering. In places like India, Palestine, and, of course, China, independence struggles convulsed societies for years on end, and refugees were inevitably caught up in these developments. During her fellowship, Dr. Hillman will explore the archives of the Far Eastern Central Information Bureau (DALJEWCIB) Harbin-Shanghai, particularly as they pertain to the Harbin refugees.  This research will allow her to go beyond the memories and private documents of the three families and to reconstruct the broader contours of the refugee community in Harbin. 

Fellowship Period: November 1, 2024-April 30,2025