About
Rachel is the Digital Humanities Specialist at UC Santa Cruz. The position is affiliated with the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship and allows me to work with the library and Humanities Division to foster digital humanities scholarship on campus.
She received my PhD in History from the UCLA based on my dissertation, “‘In a world still trembling’: American Jewish philanthropy and the shaping of Holocaust survivor narratives in postwar America (1945-1953).” This work reveals how American Jews first came to know stories about Holocaust survivors through the efforts of American Jewish communal organizations in the postwar period.
To further explore the creation of Holocaust narratives in the immediate postwar period, Rachel created an online exhibit that traces the stories of three Holocaust survivors: Memories/Motifs. Education
UCLA
PhD, History – 2014
Brandeis University
MA, Comparative History – 2005
Colgate University
BA, English with a Minor in Computer Science – 2002 Publications
“David P. Boder: Holocaust Memory in Displaced Persons Camps” in David Cesarani, and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: challenging the myth of silence, (London: Routledge, 2012) 115 – 126.
“Purim, Passover, & Pilgrims: Symbols of Survival and Sacrifice in American postwar Holocaust survivor narratives,” in Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post Holocaust Decades, ed. Sheila Elana Jelen and Eleana Adler (Wayne State University Press, 2017) Projects
Memories/Motifs
Scalar project based on 2014 Dissertation. Project follows Holocaust narratives from 3 survivors between 1945 – 2002.
Memberships
Association for Jewish Studies, American Jewish Historical Society, American Historical Association
