Samuel Kassow

Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

He has been a visiting professor at many institutions including the Hebrew University, Harvard, Toronto and Dartmouth. From 2006 until 2013 he was the lead historian for two galleries of the recently opened POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.  He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research.

He is the author of Students Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917 (University of California Press, 1989), The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry(YIVO, 2003) and Who will Write  our
History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana,  2007),  which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS and which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It has been translated into eight languages. He is also co-editor of Between Tsar and People: The Search for a Civil Society in Tsarist Russia (Princeton University Press, 1993) and the editor of In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz which Yale University Press published in October 2016. Along with David Roskies he has edited and compiled the ninth volume of the Posen Anthology of Jewish culture which Yale University Press published this year. His translation of Rachel Auerbach’s Warsaw Ghetto memoirs will appear in 2023.

In 2023 Professor Kassow was deeply honored to be chosen as a William Rosenberg Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His connections with the archive are many: he served on its academic board, participated in its program of podcasts and his mother’s testimony is in the archive. In addition, he knew William Rosenberg and his family from the time he was a young child and is grateful for the opportunity to honor his memory.

A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.