Professor Wolf Gruner

Professional Background

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as the founding director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He received his PhD and Habilitation in history from the Technical University Berlin. His research has been supported by several institutions, including Harvard University, Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, as well as Webster University in St. Louis, where he served as the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness. 

Professor Gruner is the author of eleven books, including Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims; Parias de la Patria: El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890; and the prizewinning The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. He has coedited five volumes, including Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust; New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison; and Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors’ Voices and their Future in Challenging Times. His most recent book, Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Hitler’s Persecution, was a finalist for both the National Jewish Book Award and the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Wolf Gruner will conduct research on the overlooked mass destruction and violence in Jewish homes that took place on Kristallnacht, the Nazi-orchestrated attacks against Jewish communities on November 9-10, 1938, throughout Germany and its newly annexed territories.

Based on contemporary documents, letters, diaries, newspapers, and photographs, as well as postwar survivor testimonies and trial records, Professor Gruner’s study suggests that both the scale and intensity of the attacks against Jewish homes have been gravely underestimated by historians thus far.  He plans to use the Museum’s archival and library collections, particularly the oral testimonies and postwar trials from Vienna, to explore why, in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom, many Jews—including those who had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism—either fled with nothing or took their own lives, realizing they had no future in Nazi Germany. More broadly, he aims to underscore the universal impact of mass violence on persecuted groups when private homes are targeted.

Residency Period: September 1, 2025–May 31, 2026