Professional Affiliation

Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park

Expert Bio

Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park where he taught Modern European, especially modern German history. His recent publications include Israel's Moment:  International Support for and Opposition to the Establishment of the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Radical Left, 1967-1989  (Cambridge University Press, 2016);  Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University  Press, 2009; The Jewish Enemy:  Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006), Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard University Press, 1997; and War  by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance and the Battle of the Euromissiles (Free Press, 1991); and Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984).  His essay collection, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist is forthcoming with Routledge Publishers in early 2024.

He has published essays on contemporary history and politics in The American Interest, American Purpose, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, History News Network,  The National Interest, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Quillette, The Times of Israel, Die Welt, and Die Zeit.

Education

B.A. (1969) University of Wisconsin, Madison; M.A. (1971) History, State University of New York at Buffalo; Ph.D. (1981) Sociology, Brandeis University

Subjects

European History, Modern Germany, Nazi Germany, Europe and the Middle East, Antisemitism

Experience

• Full Professor, University of Maryland, College Park, 2000-016.
• Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, College Park, 2016-
• Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, 2022-

Wilson Center Project

The Jewish Enemy:  Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). 

Project Summary

This study blends political and intellectual history to examine Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda during World War II. In their private conversations and in a massive propaganda output, the leaders of the Nazi regime viewed World War II and the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe, the Holocaust, as two aspects of one war. They did not distinguish between a war waged against the Allied coalition led, after June 1941, by Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and a second simultaneous and separate "war against the Jews." The Nazi hard core believed that it was fighting one, large war—"the Jewish war"—in which the Allies and their states and armies merged with the behind-the-scenes power of an international Jewish conspiracy. The work explores these themes in the editorials of Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, in secret press directives sent daily and weekly to newspaper and magazine editors, articles in the controlled press and weekly posters that conveyed the regime's propaganda with a mixture of visual images and text.

Major Publications

• The Jewish Enemy:  Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys Harvard University Press, Fall 1997. Winner of 1998 American Historical Association's George Louis Beer Prize; and co-winner of the 1996 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London.
• War By Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York: The Free Press, 1991)
• Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)