Ezra Mendelsohn (1940-2015)

YIVO mourns the passing of Ezra Mendelsohn, Rachel & Michael Edelman professor emeritus of European Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, who died last week in Jerusalem at age 74.

Mendelsohn, a historian, published over 30 books and articles on the Jewish labor movement, Jews in Poland and Russia, Jewish politics, and modern Jewish art and music. He served as the co-editor of the journal Studies in Contemporary Jewry and Zion. Among his works are Class Struggle in the Pale (1970), The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (1987), On Modern Jewish Politics (1993), and Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (2002). At the time of his death, he was working on a book on Jewish universalism, to be published by Rutgers University Press.

Mendelsohn's cousin, the historian Daniel Soyer (Fordham University) notes, “Ezra had a deeply historical sensibility, and was keenly aware that he himself was the product of a particular period of Jewish history, one that included the mass migration from Eastern Europe to the United States, and the rise of the State of Israel. He was one of the pioneering young scholars of the 1960s who rebuilt the field of East European Jewish history after the Holocaust. He helped especially to explain prewar Jewish political struggles to generations in Israel and America for whom those struggles and their contexts were increasingly foreign. More recently, he explored the Jewish relationship with the western artistic tradition in the modern period.”

His interest in both these areas was stimulated partly by his relationship with his own politically-engaged extended family, which included a number of artists. Teaching and scholarship also came to him as an inheritance from his family. As Professor Soyer reports, “His father, Isaac, was a professor at Columbia University whose work on slavery in antiquity is still cited. His mother, Fanny Soyer Mendelsohn was an educator, and his sister Ora Mendelsohn Rosen was a prominent medical researcher.”

Professor Mendelsohn had a long association with YIVO. Benjamin Ivry's obituary in the Forward, "Ezra Mendelsohn Expressed Hope in Humanity's Potential," mentions Mendelsohn's appearance at the 1964 “YIVO Research Conference on Jewish Participation in Movements Devoted to the Cause of Social Progress” early in his academic career, and then his appearance almost 50 years later at the 2012 YIVO conference, "Jews and the Left." In 1976, he was guest editor of The YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science (Vol. XVI).

Listen to Ezra Mendelsohn's address at the 1964 “YIVO Research Conference on Jewish Participation in Movements Devoted to the Cause of Social Progress.”

Watch a video of the 2012 "Jews and the Left" conference.
(Ezra Mendelsohn delivers the closing remarks.)