Dr. Emil Kerenji

Dr. Kerenji joined the Mandel Center in 2009 as a historian working on a source volume series, Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946. In 2016, he developed, with Dr. Leah Wolfson, Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, a digital primary-source teaching tool available to instructors teaching Holocaust-related courses in North American college classrooms. Dr. Kerenji’s current work focuses on developing the Mandel Center’s research agenda by managing phase one of the Holocaust Justice project, aimed at unlocking the Museum’s vast documentation of postwar investigations and trials to Holocaust researchers.

Dr. Kerenji is a historian of modern Jewish and East European history, with expertise in the history of the Holocaust and World War II in Yugoslavia and the Balkans more broadly. His research focuses on the relationship of genocidal violence against Jews and violent nationalizing regional policies of states allied with Nazi Germany. 

Prior to joining the Museum, Dr. Kerenji was a case officer working on refugee resettlement at the UNHCR office in Belgrade, Serbia. He was also an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Education

• PhD, East European and Jewish history, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008

• MA, history, Central European University, Budapest, 1998

• BA, history and political science, American University in Bulgaria, Blagoevgrad, 1997

Languages

• English

• Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (native)

• German (reading)

• Yiddish (reading)

• Bulgarian (reading)

• Macedonian (reading)

• Hebrew (basic reading)

Select Publications

• “German and Local Violence in the Balkans,” forthcoming in volume 2 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust, edited by Mary Fulbrook and Jürgen Matthäus, to be published by Cambridge University Press

• Postwar Justice in Yugoslavia, 1943–1949: Between Justice and Legitimation, forthcoming, copublished by the Museum

• “Decentering ‘Cosmopolitan’ Holocaust Memory,” Shofar, vol. 40 (2022)

• “Rebuilding the Community: The Federation of Jewish Communities and American Jewish humanitarian aid in Yugoslavia, 1944–1952,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, vol. 17 (2017)

• Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946: A Source Reader, a volume in the Mandel Center’s series Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context, coeditor (2017)

• “‘Your Salvation is the Struggle against Fascism’: Yugoslav Communists and the Rescue of Jews, 1941–1945,” Contemporary European History, vol. 25 (2016)

• “Yugoslav Worlds of Hanna Lévy-Hass,” afterword in Hanna Lévy-Hass’s Diary of Bergen-Belsen: 1944–1945, Haymarket Books (2009)

• Obični ljudi: 101. rezervni policijski bataljon i konačno rešenje u Poljskoj, translation into Serbian of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning, Fabrika knjiga (2004)

Select Presentations and Interviews

• Access Utah episode, interview with Utah Public Radio on the Jewish Responses to Persecution project