Jews on the Move: How Philanthropy and Migration Remade the Modern Jewish World and What’s Happening Now

Sunday, April 30, 2022 at 5:00PM
in the Chapel

Register Here

Baron Maurice de Hirsch was one of the emblematic figures of the nineteenth century and the most influential Jewish philanthropist of his time.  Today Hirsch is less well known that the Rothschilds, or his counterpart Andrew Carnegie. Yet to his contemporaries  he was the very embodiment of the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy and politics in the nineteenth century, a period when, as now, private benefactors played an outside role in shaping the collective fate of Jewish communities.

Join us as UC Irvine historian Matthias Lehmann discusses his new biography of Baron Hirsch with Chapman historian Shira Klein, in an event moderated  by Joel Kotkin.  Together they will explore how philanthropy and mass migration forever remade the modern Jewish world and discuss what’s happening now.

Matthias Lehann is the Teller Family Chair in Jewish History at the University of California, Irvine.  An elected member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, his recent publication is Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century (Stanford, 2022) as well as Jews and the Mediterranean with Jessica Marglin (Indiana, 2020), as well as other publications.

Shira Klein is ssociate professor of hstory at Chapman University.  Her book Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (Cambridge University Press), was selected as a finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award.  The book uncovers the Italian Jewish experience from the late nineteenth century to the Holocaust and postwar years.

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive director of their Center for Demographics and Policy . He is author of The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter), as well as many other books.  He is a contributing editor to numerous publications and editor of the website NewGeography.com.