Overview
Jan Burzlaff is a Post Doctoral Associate in the Program of Jewish Studies. Before joining Cornell in August 2024, he was the William A. Ackman Fellow for Holocaust Studies at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in Jewish and modern European history. His PhD, Surviving in the Holocaust: A Transnational History, based upon over 2,000 testimonies from 15 archives and in 10 languages, investigated how Jews sought to survive in four cities in Western Europe (Marseille, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen) and four in Eastern Europe (Kyiv, Lviv, Vilnius, and Kraków). Prior to completing his PhD at Harvard, Burzlaff was the 2016–17 Jane Eliza Procter Fellow at Princeton University, and a former fellow at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris in 2014-2017. As a historian, he is committed to bringing to life the contingency and complexity of human behaviors in extremis, particularly the responses of Jews and non-Jews between 1939 and 1945. As cases of mass violence across the globe are again on the rise, his scholarship aims to yield a fuller understanding of civilian responses to persecution.
His new, book-length project tentatively entitled Help and Harm: A Social History of Nazi Europe (1939–1945), continues in this vein. It develops the social history of wartime Europe, particularly the many ways in which the Nazi persecution reconfigured relations not only between Jews and non-Jews, but among non-Jewish communities — one building, one street, one neighborhood at a time. Help and Harm sketches the first comparative history of encounters between local populations and Jewish communities across occupied Europe. It engages in a systematic dialogue with the social sciences and offers a tentative answer to an unresolved question of modern violence: what made fleeting support, let alone rescue, more likely for those persecuted? Help and Harm will shift the focus from the current emphasis on beliefs and values to one on everyday life and social interactions. Broader research interests include interdisciplinary dialogues with the social sciences, visual and spatial histories, social and cultural histories of violenceand politics during the modern era.
Publications
Forthcoming:
“Global Histories of Violence: Two Propositions,” English Historical Review, FirstView, 2024.
“Thinking With Testimony,” Yad Vashem Studies, no. 52, 2 (2024).
Published:
“Silence and Small Gestures: Jews and non-Jews in the Netherlands (1940–1945),” Contemporary European History, 32, 3 (2023), 401-415.
“Histories in Motion: The Holocaust, Social Science Research, and the Historian,” in Jeffrey S. Kopstein, Jelena Subotić, and Susan Welch, eds., Politics, Violence, Memory: The New Social Science of the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023, 53-66.
“In the Shadow of the Gas Chambers: Social Ties and Daily Life around the Death Camp of Bełżec (1941—1945),” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 35, 3 (2021), 445-463.
“Icons, Trodden Sand, and the Violence of the Gaze: Looking at the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies, 49, 1 (2021).
“Vers des histoires transnationales de la Shoah: le cas des relations sociales dans l’Europe de l’Est”, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 212 (2020), 293-318.
“When The Fires Were Lit: Anti-Jewish Violence in Eastern Europe, 1917—1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, 55, 4 (2020), 893-903.
“The Holocaust and Slavery? Working Towards A Comparative History of Genocide and Mass Violence,” Journal of Genocide Research, 22, 3 (2020), 354-366.
“Confronting the Communal Grave: A Reassessment of Social Relations During the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” The Historical Journal, 63, 4 (2020), 1054–1077.