Professional Background
Jonathan Marrow is a PhD candidate in history at Cambridge University. Mr. Marrow holds two master's degrees: one in Jewish Studies from Oxford University and one in United States history from Cambridge University. He also holds a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University. During his studies, Mr. Marrow worked as a secondary school teacher in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Boston, Massachusetts, teaching courses on the Holocaust, American Civics, and World History.
Mr. Marrow’s research explores the development of Holocaust travel or “tourism” to European Holocaust sites by Americans from the 1960s to the 2000s. While historians and museum studies scholars have examined Holocaust commemoration and the development of Shoah-related sites throughout Europe and the United States, few have analyzed the motives or networks underlying the growth of mass Holocaust tourism from minuscule numbers before the 1970s to hundreds of thousands by the 21st century. Mr. Marrow addresses this gap by examining the marketing efforts of tour companies, the publication of travel guides and travel writing in newspapers and magazines, and travel initiatives undertaken by American religious, secular nonprofit, and governmental organizations. His research considers how Holocaust travel was both discursively and practically broadened from a Jewish “ethnic” practice to a universal phenomenon for Americans of other faiths and of none, throughout the Cold War and in the aftermath of Communism’s fall.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust, and the Jews, Jonathan Marrow will conduct research in the Museum’s institutional archives to consider how early development and planning delegations’ trips to European Holocaust sites both modeled and were influenced by commercial and cultural tours. Such visits formed part of a wider pattern of American institutional travel to Holocaust sites, including military educational visits to the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, government delegations to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and the proliferation of state teacher-training programs. Mr. Marrow will examine the archival records of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council to study the development of itineraries and how educators, curators, and program organizers conceptualized multi-site journeys and positioned the Museum within a broader global network of Holocaust pedagogy and commemoration. He will also study the Museum’s collections of early tourist guidebooks and promotional materials related to Jewish and Holocaust sites in Europe to examine how Holocaust-related travel was first marketed to foreign audiences in the Cold War years.
Residency Period: September 1, 2026 – December 31, 2026