Obituary: In Memoriam: Ezra Mendelsohn

Ezra Mendelsohn, a distinguished historian and cultural figure, and the Rachel and Michael Edelman Emeritus Professor of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, died in May of cancer at the age of seventy-four. Born in New York City’s Upper West Side in 1940 to a prominent family, he came to academic life naturally. His father, Isaac Mendelsohn, was a professor of Semitic languages at Columbia University; his mother was a teacher of remedial reading. His sister Ora Mendelsohn Rosen was a research scientist at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center before her demise from the disease she studied. Shortly after receiving his Ph.D from Columbia in 1966, Mendelsohn went to Israel, then basking in the post–Six Day War euphoria, to join the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught there for most of his career, twice chairing the Institute of Contemporary Jewry. For more than a quarter-century he served as co-editor of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, and he co-edited Zion from 2007 until his death. He is the author and editor of seminal works in Jewish history and culture, and had the most diverse interests: art and music, history and politics, sport, class struggles, Eastern Europe, and Russia both Imperial and Soviet.

Mendelsohn was a widely sought-after speaker, and was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, UCLA, and NYU; upon retirement from Hebrew University he taught for four years at Boston University. His work in Holocaust-related subjects includes The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars (co-editor) and Studies in Polish Jewry (coeditor, special issue of Polin). His work on art includes a co-authored study of the Soyer Brothers, and is perhaps best represented by his co-edited volume Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art. He was particularly interested in the role of art in Jewish history, and Jewish-Polish relations. He also published widely on the Jews in the Russian Empire during the revolutionary years of the early twentieth century and into the Soviet period. Mendelsohn sustained his early interest in Jewish politics in several important works. His last published project was Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, which he co-edited with Hebrew University colleagues in honor of Steven Aschheim. One issue of Studies in Contemporary Jewry explores the role of sports in modern Jewish history. Sports have been crucial in forging national and ethnic identities, yet there have been few explorations of the topic in Jewish studies—even though physical culture had a particular resonance in the Zionist movement, and participation in sports had the important effect of undermining stereotypes.

Mendelsohn’s place in Jewish intellectual life was widely recognized. The National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in Jewish Scholarship, and in Israel he received the Bialik Prize for his work on Gottlieb. He was a featured speaker at YIVO’s conference “Jews and the Left,” and was assigned the unenviable task of summarizing its proceedings. Although his scholarship was rooted in the working class, he took issue with “the destructive universalism” of the Jewish Left, or as he put it, “identifying with everyone who isn’t you.” He was also highly critical of the Jewish left’s romance with Communism, especially those who defended it after it became “an engine of murder.” Critical of the right as well, Mendelsohn was not sanguine about the chances of a Leftist revival in the United States, and was highly critical of the “anti-Enlightenment” manifested in Israel by the increasing strength of ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalist forces. His hope for a new self-affirming Jewish Left was rooted in the revived movement for social justice in Israel.¹ At his death, he was working on a book on Jewish universalism.

Fordham University historian Daniel Soyer best summed up his cousin’s intellectual contribution in a statement to YIVO: Ezra “was keenly aware that he himself was the product of a particular period of Jewish history, one that included the mass migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, and the...