Professional Background
Abraham Rubin is an assistant professor of Jewish studies at the University of Dayton. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and the Goethe University Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the City University of New York. He is the author of Conversion and Catastrophe in German-Jewish Émigré Autobiography (University of Toronto Press, in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2025), and his scholarly work has appeared in such journals as Literature & Theology, The AJS Review, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Jewish Social Studies.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as an Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow, Abraham Rubin will be working on a book manuscript titled Traversing the Jewish-Christian Borderlands in Postwar German-Jewish Theology. The project is an intellectual biography of Margarete Susman, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, and Schalom Ben-Chorin, three thinkers who played an important role in promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue in postwar Germany. Dr. Rubin's research examines how their work towards interfaith understanding contributed to West Germany’s moral reckoning with antisemitism and the Holocaust. His project further seeks to understand how these three figures sought to rethink pre-existing conceptions of religious and cultural boundaries in their respective theologies and to assess the impact of their thought on Jewish and Christian circles. The study offers a novel approach to theorizing the transformations that religious cultures and identities undergo in the historical processes of trauma, migration, and political reconciliation.
Residency Period: June 1, 2027 – July 31, 2027