Lunchtime Lecture: Jonathan R. Zatlin on Economics in German-Jewish History

Part 5 of LBI's 70th Anniversary Lecture Series

On October 22 at 12:00 PM EDT, Jonathan R. Zatlin will discuss economics in German-Jewish historiography over the past decades.

As we look back at the last 70 years of German-Jewish historiography since the founding of the Leo Baeck Institute, LBI presents a series of seven events focusing on the most important topics in German Jewish history. Each generation of historians witnesses the appearance of different approaches to historical writing. After decades of focusing on the main political events in German-Jewish history and biographies of political leaders, there has been a turn to microhistory, the role of common people, women and children, minorities, stories dominated by struggles and failures, etc. In the new series, the LBI will present a comprehensive view of seven overarching topics in German Jewish history and ask how their historiography has changed over the decades.

This lecture series will take place online.

About the Speaker:

Jonathan R. Zatlin is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. His early work explored the history of German communism, focusing on the social construction of value in East Germany to understand the terms of German unification. He is the author of The Currency of Socialism. Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-edited Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Duke University Press, 2007) with Jonathan Wiesen and Pamela Swett and New Directions in East German Historiography. German Yearbook for Contemporary History, vol. 9 (Munich and Lincoln: Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History and University of Nebraska Press, 2025) with Dierk Hoffmann and Hermann Wentker.

More recently, Zatlin has written about popular conflations of Jews with injustice and the market in German history. He co-edited Dispossession. Plundering Germany Jewry, 1933-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2020) with Christoph Kreutzmüller and is currently completing Fantasies of Jewish Wealth, 1790-1990, which will appear in the University of Chicago Press’s Intellectual History series. His articles and essays have been translated into French, German, and Hebrew. He is the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has been active in professional organizations related to German and Jewish history, including the Leo Baeck Institute-New York.