Professor Marion Kaplan is a world-renowned scholar of German-Jewish history. Educated at Rutgers University and Columbia University, Marion Kaplan is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She previously taught at Queens College, the City University of New York, and has served as visiting lecturer at Columbia University and Princeton University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her research on German Jewish life in The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (1991); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (1998); and Gender and Jewish History, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore (2011).

Professor Kaplan has written about the role of women in Weimar and Nazi Germany in her earlier books The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904‑1938 (1979) and The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History, and the co-edited volume When Biology became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (1984). She is also the author of Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945 (2008), which tells the story of Jewish refugees’ settlement in the Dominican Republic following Nazi persecution. Her newest book, Jewish Refugees Fleeing Hitler: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45, will be published by Yale University Press in 2019. She is the author of over five dozen articles and over a dozen book reviews.

Professor Kaplan has won numerous awards and accolades, including the 1998 Fraenkel Prize, the 1991 AHA Central European History Book Prize, the 2012 NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award, the 2014 J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the 2018 Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies from the Holocaust Educational Foundation.

She served as the director of the Leo Baeck Institute from 1983 to 185 and currently sits on its Academic Advisory Committee. Professor Kaplan has also served on the advisory committee of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the academic council of the New York Center for Jewish History, and the editorial board of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Read Professor Kaplan's Shapiro lecture summary here.