Welcome Leo Spitzer, Rosenberg Senior Scholar 2025

Please join us in welcoming Leo Spitzer, as a William Rosenberg Senior Scholar, thanks to funding from the Claims Conference.

Spitzer is Vernon Professor of History Emeritus and Research Professor at Dartmouth College. He writes about responses to imperialism, Jewish refugee memory, and traumatic witnessing and its transmission. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies. His books include Lives in Between: Assimilation, Marginality, Exclusion in the Era of Emancipation (1989) and Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1998). He is also the editor of Arthur Kessler: A Doctor’s Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust (2024) and is currently writing about entjudung in Rechnitz in 1938: ethnic cleansing in a small Austrian town where his father was born and parental family lived.

Together with Marianne Hirsch, Spitzer has co-authored two books: Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010) and School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (2020).

As Senior Scholar, Spitzer will produce an annotated critical edition of a testimony for our Critical Edition Series as part of our Claims Conference Grant Unlocking Survivor Testimony: A Program to Produce Critical Annotated Editions of Non-English Holocaust Testimonies.