Michael Brenner

Prof. Michael Brenner is the first winner of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research on the Jewish Experience.

Brenner is American University’s Seymour and Lillian Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies and Director of AU’s Center for Israel Studies. In addition to his positions at American University, Brenner is the Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich. He received his PhD at Columbia University, taught previously at Indiana and Brandeis Universities, and has held visiting appointments at numerous universities, including Haifa, Paris, Budapest, Stanford, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins. Besides being a member of the Bavarian Academy of Science, of the American Academy for Jewish Research and of the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantua, he serves as the international president of the Leo Baeck Institute. In 2015, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas presented Brenner with the German Federal Order of Merit, praising him as “a guardian of Jewish history” and an important supporter of Jewish life in Germany and worldwide.

Brenner’s research focuses on the history of the Jews from the 19th to the 21st century, including the Shoah and the State of Israel. His books have been translated into ten languages. They include In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea; A Short History of the Jews; Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History; Zionism: A Brief History; The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany; and After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany. In addition, he has co-authored the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times and edited seventeen books, among them a study of religion and state in Israel.

His colleague at American University, Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (and Professor of History and International Relations) Max Paul Friedman, says that Brenner is “a giant — a gentle giant” — in the fields of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies: "This award recognizes the extraordinary scope and reach of Michael’s contributions to scholarship, as well as his building an international community of scholars devoted to this work." Friedman calls Brenner

a historian with a writer’s sensibility, whose reflections on the visions and nightmares and imaginary utopias that are the Israel of the mind are as lyrical as they are filled with insight. His many books on German Jewish history have given members of his community — survivors of an attempt at total erasure — as well as the Germany of today a window into the rich and varied cultural landscape of their collective past. And he has used his national stature in his country of birth to become a forceful advocate of human rights for all.