Dr. Lisa Leff

Lisa Leff is the Museum’s Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs.

She also serves as Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC.

Dr. Leff is a historian of modern European and modern Jewish history. Her research focuses on the Jews of modern France from the time of the French Revolution to the present. She is especially interested in modern political ideas, internationalism, imperialism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. She has presented her work widely around the world, in both academic and nonacademic settings.

Dr. Leff is a past president of the Society for French Historical Studies and is a member of the American Historical Association and the Association for Jewish Studies. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Jewish Quarterly Review, Jewish Social Studies, and Jewish History. She is also an elected fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Education

• PhD, history, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 2000

• MA, history, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 1993

• BA with high honors, philosophy and history, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, 1991

Select Publications

• “A Murky Business: Doing Jewish History in France, 1961,”Jewish Quarterly Review 113, 1 (2023): 5-9.

• “Saving the Jews of the Diaspora: Jewish Aid Organizations” (with Nathan Kurz), in Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora, ed. Hasia Diner (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 562-585

• “Liberalism and Antisemitism: A Reassessment from the Peripheries,” in

  Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History, edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam (2021)

• “A Stone under the Wheel of History,” in Advancing Holocaust Studies, edited by Carol Rittner and John Roth (2020)

• Colonialism and the Jews, coeditor (2017). Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (Category: Anthologies and Collections)

• The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (2015, paperback 2018). Awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (Category: JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material)

• Jewish Migration and the Archive, coeditor (2015, paperback 2017)

• “How to Be a Jew in France: Léon Blum and French Anti-Semitism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 94 (2015)

• “The Book Thief: How Stolen Nazi Documents Made Their Way to American Jewish Archives,”Tablet (2013)

• Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (2006)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• “Restitution and Jewish Identity,” December 2021 virtual program through the Jewish Museum, New York, New York

• “The French Jewish Experience (A Recap),” November 2020 speaker, The Temple Emanuel Streicker Center

• The Archive Thief at Jewish Book Week, London, 2017 interview with Hannah Rothschild