Professional Background
Robin Judd is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio, where she served as the inaugural director of its Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Program.
As a scholar of Jewish, transnational, and gender history, with interests in Holocaust studies and the history of leadership, Dr. Judd has developed an extensive repertoire of research, service, and teaching agendas that address complex interdisciplinary issues concerning Jews, Jewish communities, and Jewish peoplehood. Beginning with doctoral work on nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, her research expanded to consider an array of transregional and transnational contexts linked by her interests in the ways migration, disruption, and displacement affect Jewish understandings of community, religious engagement, and family life.
Dr. Judd’s most recent book, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust, examined European and North African Jewish survivors who married members of the American, British, and Canadian armed forces after the Holocaust. Her first book, Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933, analyzed how the Jewish rituals of circumcision and kosher butchering became a focal point of political struggles among the developing German state, its municipal governments, Jews, and non-Jews. Both projects placed Jews and Judaism within mainstream historical narratives rather than at its margins.
Between Two Worlds garnered two National Jewish Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2024 Ohioana non-fiction award. In addition to several different academic research fellowships, Dr. Judd has also received seven teaching awards and two leadership awards.
She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the largest international learned society for scholars interested in Jewish Studies, and currently serves as the chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute (New York/Berlin) and the chair of the State of Ohio’s Holocaust and Genocide Memorial and Education Commission.
Fellowship Research
While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Robin Judd will conduct research for her new project, “Gatekeepers of Memory: Military Chaplains and Jewish Artifacts After the Holocaust.” This innovative transnational history examines how five Jewish military chaplains from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Palestine actively shaped the memory of the Holocaust by engaging with damaged synagogues and their artifacts across Europe. Her project will tell a cross-cultural and multinational history of identity, memory, and built environments during and after the Holocaust.
Residency Period: September 1, 2026 – May 31, 2027