Rebekka Grossmann obtained her Ph.D. in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020. In 2019/20 she was a fellow of the Binational Visiting Tandem Program in the History of Migration at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020/21 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University and between 2021 and 2023 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University. She received her M.Phil from the University of Oxford and her BA from the University of Freiburg. 

As a historian of migration history Rebekka Grossmann approaches the question of how patterns of mobility shaped encounters between minorities and majority cultures, placing special emphasis on the analytical lens of visual culture. Her first monograph, Unsettled Cameras: Photography, Mobility, and Nation in Jewish History, 1918-1948, currently under review for publication, locates photography in the study of Jewish nationalism. It argues that international visual culture shaped by migratory mobility and media globalization actively influenced the thinking about modern Jewish belonging. Rebekka Grossmann is also involved in a project that studies the history of Jewish vernacular photography in Nazi Germany. Titled Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany the co-authored monograph is forthcoming with Pennsylvania University Press. She is currently developing a new monograph project on the history of migrant contributions to humanitarian photography. The planned project complements transnational approaches to Jewish political history with a global history angle to ask how forced and voluntary Jewish mobility informed the history of humanitarianism. 

Fields of interest

• Migration
• Jewish History
• Visual Culture
• Photography
• Global Media and Communication
• History of Nationalism 

Selected publications

• 2023 “Photography between Empire and Nation: German-Jewish Displacement and the Global Camera,” Contemporary Europe in the Historical Imagination, eds. Skye Doney and Darcy Buerkle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), 234-252.
• 2023 “Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture,” Naharaim: Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 16, no. 2, 203-227.
• 2021 “The ‘Colonial’ Vantage Point: Imperial Photography in Mandate Palestine,” Israel Studies 26, no. 3 (2021), 158-178.
• 2019 “Image Transfer and Visual Friction. Staging Palestine in the National Socialist Spectacle,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 64, no. 1 (2019), 19-45.
• 2018 “Negotiating Presences. Palestine and the Weimar German Gaze,” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 2 (2018), 137-172.