Laura Jockusch

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Laura Jockusch is the Albert Abramson Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching focus on the social, political, cultural, and legal histories of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust and engage in comparative, transnational, and cross-disciplinary perspectives.

Her current book project explores the trials of Stella Goldschlag (aka Kübler-Isaaksohn), a German Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust in Germany because she betrayed other Jews to Nazi authorities: before a Soviet military tribunal in 1946 for “crimes against humanity” and before German criminal courts in 1957 and 1972 for “accessory to murder.” Found guilty three times but seeing herself as a victim who had tried to save her family from deportation and death, Goldschlag committed suicide in 1994. Analyzing the complexities of Goldschlag’s rationalization of her wartime actions, the roles played by Holocaust survivors in bringing her to justice, the legal conceptualizations of her wrongdoing, and the responses of the German public, this project seeks to make original contributions to Holocaust and genocide studies, women’s and gender studies, German history, and the history of transitional justice.

Jockusch holds a doctorate from New York University, and she was a research fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her first book, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012), won a National Jewish Book Award and a Sybil Halpern Milton Book Prize.