Dr. Daniel Blatman

Professional Background

Dr. Daniel Blatman earned a Ph.D., summa cum laude, and an M.A. in contemporary Jewry from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a B.A. in history and education from the same university. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For his Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Dr. Blatman conducted research on, “Kriegsende and Genocidal Massacre: Germany, April 1945.”

Dr. Blatman is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous scholarly publications including For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund, 1939-1949 (Yad Vashem, 1996) which has been translated into English and French, and Reportage from the Ghetto, The Jewish Underground press in Warsw, 1939-1945 (Yad Vashem, 2002) which was also published in French. His articles have been published in a range of books and academic journals and include “A Hesitant Partnership: The Bund and Polish Socialists during the Holocaust” (in Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, Yad Vashem, 2003) and “The Polish Street Fell Short in Its Relations with the Jews” (in Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in Europe, Berlin: Metropol, 2004). For his exceptional scholarly work, Dr. Blatman was awarded a four-year grant from the Israel Science Foundation to conduct research on “The Death Marches and the Evacuation of the Concentration Camps, January-May 1945.” The recipient of the Jakob Buchman Prize for the Memory of the Holocaust and the Pridan Prize for Studies in East European Jewish History, Dr. Blatman has held visiting professorships at Tel Aviv University, New York University and Georgetown University. In 2005 he co-taught the International Scholarly Workshop on “The Holocaust in Poland: Antecedents, Execution Aftermath” sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Fellowship Research

During his tenure at the Center, Dr. Blatman conducted a case study of a massacre of approximately 1,400 Jewish survivors of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp near Gardelegen, Germany in April 1945. He explored the complex social and political situation in Germany in the last weeks of the war and the motivational factors that led ordinary citizens of Gardelegen to independently initiate this massacre. Dr. Blatman attempted to synthesize the social history of Nazi perpetrators with theories associated with contemporary genocide and genocidal massacre.

Dr. Blatman was in residence at the Mandel Center from Janaury 17 to October 11, 2006.