Dr Sara Halpern

Biography

I received my BA in History from Colgate University in 2008 and MA in Judaic Studies from the University of Michigan in 2010. I completed my PhD in Modern Jewish and European History at the Ohio State University in 2020.

Professional memberships

• Association for Jewish Studies
• American Historial Association
• Early Career Research Network, the British Academy

 

Academic positions

• Visiting Assistant Professor of European History, St. Olaf College (2021-2022)

Speaking engagements

• “’A Problem of Some Delicacy’: Chinese Sovereignty, Jewish Refugees, and the West, 1945-1946,” Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum, Zoom (December 2021)
• “The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to the Rescue in Shanghai from Treaty Port to Mao,” Center for Jewish History, Zoom (October 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AsJIZXNB5o
• “Will Anyone Help Us, Too?: The International Humanitarian Response to Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, 1938-1958,” Baeumler-Kaplan Holocaust Commemoration, University of Minnesota, Duluth (April 2019)
• “In Their Own Words as Jewish Refugees: Children, Grown-Ups, and Saying Goodbye to Shanghai,1945-1949,” Jewish Museum of Maryland (March 2019)

Teaching

I teach modern Jewish and European history as well as the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

As a historian of Jewish background and with disabilities, I am sensitive to contested definitions of belonging with regards to marginalized groups in the modern period. My main area of research is the global history of Jewish refugees during and after the Holocaust. I employ transnational and comparative approaches while considering significant historiographical questions stemming from case studies in Europe and the United States.

 My current book project, derived from my PhD thesis, Saving the Unwanted: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees in the Wake of the Second World War, explores the tensions between nationalism and humanitarianism in the aftermath of Nazi and Japanese racialized atrocities. It adopts a global microhistorical framework to situate 15,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees, who found refuge in Shanghai in 1938-1940, within the context of postwar relief and reconstruction carried out by international organisations such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. While these organisations set up offices in China, staff in those offices often mediated between institutional policies created for displaced Europeans in Europe and actual cultural and political realities in China, Australia, and the United States. The identities of Jewish refugees in Shanghai were contested in the realms of relief and migration controls on the basis of their nationality status, Europeanness, and Jewishness. This research, covering the period from 1943 to 1949, highlights how Shanghai’s Jewish refugees came to represent the unwanted human spoils of Western imperialism in Shanghai as racism and nationalism persisted worldwide.

 This project has won numerous national and international grants and fellowships. They included but not limited to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Social Science Research Council, Association for Jewish Studies, and Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes/Leo-Baeck Programme (now part of DAAD/German Academic Exchange Service), Leo Baeck Institute, DAAD, and the American Academy for Jewish Research. In addition, it was selected for the 2022 Dissertation Award from the Ohio Academy of History.

PUBLICATIONS

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“The Integration of Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees into Post-World War II San Francisco,” American Jewish History 104, no. 1 (2020): 87-115. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2020.0000   

Invited Book Chapters

“’A Problem of Some Delicacy’: Chinese Sovereignty, Jewish Refugees, and the West, 1945-1946” in Kevin Ostoyich and Yun Xia, eds., The History of Shanghai Jews: New Pathways for Research, Palgrave MacMillan, 2022.

Supervision