Shira Klein is an Associate Professor of History at Chapman University. Her book Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press) was selected as double-finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a new manuscript about Italian Jewish participation in Italy’s African colonies. At Chapman, Dr Klein teaches Jewish, Holocaust, European, and migration history. 

With the support of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Professor Klein integrated testimonies from the Visual History Archive into two of her history courses – an existing undergraduate course entitled “Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler” and a newly developed graduate course entitled “Jewish Migration and War.” Previously in her teaching, she selected excerpts of testimonies from the Visual History Archive to show in her classes. In the undergraduate course, students combined Visual History Archive interviews with secondary sources to reflect on how the life history of an Italian, French, or German Jewish individual illustrates larger historical events or developments. In the graduate course, Professor Klein’s students used testimonies as one of three primary sources for their research into Jewish migration in the 1930s and 1940s. She incorporated her work at the Shoah Foundation into her newest book, Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism, about the history of Italian Jews from the late 19th century to the 1950s.