Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is the Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies at American University in Washington DC and directs AU’s Center for Israel Studies. He also holds the chair of Jewish History and Culture at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He received his PhD at Columbia University and taught previously at Indiana and Brandeis Universities. He had visiting appointments at numerous universities, including Haifa, Paris, Budapest, Stanford, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins. Professor Brenner is an elected fellow of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for Jewish Research and the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantua. He is the International President of the Leo Baeck Institute and serves on many academic boards, including the Association for Israel Studies, the Israel Institute, the DAAD Center of the University of Haifa and is board chair of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His books have been translated into ten languages and include A Short History of the Jews; Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History; Zionism: A Brief History; The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, and After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany. He is co-author of the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times and editor of seventeen books.