Joshua Leifer

PhD Student

European Studies Council

Academic Year: 2026-27, 2025-26, 2024-25

Research Interests:

Modern European Intellectual History; Modern European Jewish History; Holocaust Memory and Memory Politics; the Cold War and Decolonization; modern social thought; political theory

Joshua Leifer is a doctoral candidate in the history department, where his research sits at the nexus of modern European intellectual history, modern Jewish politics, and Holocaust memory. His dissertation project, tentatively titled "Jewish Politics and the Cold War Nation State," is a transnational history of debates in Western Europe, America, and Israel about the persistence of the “Jewish Question," the study of antisemitism, and the global transformation of Jewish politics during the Cold War.

He is also journalist whose essays and reporting have been published in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and elsewhere. His first book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, was published by Dutton in August 2024 and won a National Jewish Book Award in 2025. He is a member of the Dissent magazine editorial board.

Department: History