Rebekka Grossmann is an assistant professor of migration history.

More information about Rebekka Grossmann

Fields of interest

Migration, Jewish History, Visual Culture, Photography, Global Media and Communication, Nationalism, Israel-Palestin.

Research

As a historian of migration, Rebekka Grossmann asks how modern mobilities have been shaping encounters between minorities and majority cultures. Her work pays particular attention to visual culture and the global circulation of media as methodological lenses for understanding migration history. Her first monograph, Unsettled Cameras: Photography, Mobility, and Jewish Nation-Building in Mandate Palestine, forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press, examines the role of visual culture in Jewish nationalism. The book argues that migratory mobility and media globalization actively influenced the thinking about modern Jewish belonging. Recently, she has co-authored Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany, which explores Jewish artistic agency in times of persecution and crisis. She is currently developing a new monograph project on the history of migrant contributions to twentieth-century humanitarian activism.

Grants and awards

• 2024 Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship, Leo Baeck Institute New York-Berlin
• 2023-2026 (Declined) Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Mandel Scholion Research Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 2023-2024 (Declined) The Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• 2021-2023 Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Postdoctoral Advisors: Dan Diner, Iris Nachum)
• 2021-2024 (Declined) Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, UCL London
• 2021-2022 (Declined) Guest professorship for Israel Studies, Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam

CV

Rebekka Grossmann obtained her Ph.D. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020. In 2019/20 she was a fellow of the Binational Visiting Tandem Program in the History of Migration at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020/21 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University and between 2021 and 2023 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University. She received her M.Phil from the University of Oxford and her BA from the University of Freiburg.

Selected publications

2025 Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany, with Ofer Ashkenazi, Shira Miron and Sarah Wobick-Segev (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

2025 “Moving Views: Global Routes of Jewish Refuge as Spaces of Early Humanitarian Seeing,” Rethinking Jewish History and Memory through Photography, eds. Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025).

2024 “Illustrating a Jewish Life: Portrait Photography, Biography and the Creation of a Jewish Public Sphere,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 18, no. 1, 133-162.

2023 “Photography between Empire and Nation: German-Jewish Displacement and the Global Camera,” Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, eds. Skye Doney and Darcy Buerkle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).

2023 “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 16, no. 2, 203-227.