Jeffrey Herf

Herf's father escaped from Nazi Germany in 1937 and immigrated to the United States.

His mother's parents left Ukraine to came to the United States before World War I.

He grew up in a Reform Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Jeffrey C. Herf (born April 24, 1947) is an American historian of modern Europe, particularly modern Germany.

He is Distinguished University Professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park.

He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Herf graduated in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969 and received his PhD in sociology from Brandeis University in 1981.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland, he taught at Harvard University, Ohio University, and Emory University.

His subsequent books examine the political culture of West Germany before and during the battle over Euromissiles in the 1980s; memory and politics regarding the Holocaust in East and West Germany; Nazi Germany's domestic antisemitic propaganda; and Nazi propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East; and the history of antagonism to Israel by the East German regime and West German leftist organizations from the Six Day War in 1967 to the Revolutions of 1989, the collapse of the European Communist states and the German reunification in 1990.

In his 1984 book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, drawing on critical theory, in particular ideology critique, Herf coined the term "reactionary modernism" to describe the mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past, a highly technological romanticism, which was a current in the thinking of ideologues of Weimar's "conservative revolution" and of currents in the Nazi Party and Nazi regime.

Herf has had a variety of fellowships including at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the German Historical Institute in Washington, the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies in Tel Aviv, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and at the American Academy in Berlin in Fall 2007.

He is married to the historian and artist Sonya Michel.

Edited books

Jeffrey Herf, ed., Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspectives: Convergence and Divergence (New York: Routledge, 2007).>

Translations

Essays and reviews on contemporary history, ideas and politics in American Interest, American Purpose, Commentary, Fathom Journal, Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung, History News Network, New German Critique, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Quillette, The Tablet Magazine, Telos,Times of Israel, Washington Post, Die Welt, and Die Zeit.

Anthony McElligott and Jeffrey Herf, eds., Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).