Gavriel David Rosenfeld (born 1967) is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history. He is an editor of The Journal of Holocaust Research and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review, which features news, analysis, and commentary from the world of counterfactual and alternate history.

Early life and education

Rosenfeld is the son of Alvin H. Rosenfeld, longtime Professor of English and Jewish Studies, former Director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, and founder of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, and Erna B. Rosenfeld, former Area Coordinator for Indiana University Residence Life.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Rosenfeld graduated from Bloomington High School South in 1985. He received his B.A. in History and Judaic Studies from Brown University in 1989. Following a year studying at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship (1989–90), he received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 1996.  His sister, Dalia Rosenfeld, is a prize-winning fiction writer, editor, and translator based in Tel Aviv.^[6][7]

Career

Since 2000, Rosenfeld has taught at Fairfield University, where he offers courses on modern European History, German History, Holocaust History, Jewish History, Memory Studies, and Counterfactual History. He has written widely on how the memory of the Third Reich and Second World War has taken shape in Western culture—especially in architecture, monuments, literature, film, television, and historiography—and how the memory of the Nazi era has become increasingly "normalized." Rosenfeld's 2015 book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015), won the German Studies Association's 2017 Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize for the best book dealing with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.^[8] His 2011 book, Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, which explores the origins of "new Jewish architecture," was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of visual arts.^[9]

Rosenfeld has also been a leading scholar in the field of counterfactual history. His key works include The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (2005), What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism (2016), and "The Ways We Wonder 'What If?": Towards a Typology of Historical Counterfactuals (2016).^[10] In 2013, he created a blog, The Counterfactual History Review, which provides regular commentary on the use of counterfactuals in Western intellectual and cultural life.

Rosenfeld's current research focuses on the history and memory of fascism in the United States. His essays on the topic include "An American Führer? Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to Explain Donald Trump" (2019),^[11] "Donald Trump's Situational Fascism" (2021), "Beyond Fascism: Trumpism after Trump (2021), and the new edited volume, edited with Janet Ward, Fascism in America: Past and Present.^[12]

Rosenfeld has published dozens of essays and opinion pieces in such publications as The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Forward, The Jewish Review of Books, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Hartford Courant, The History News Network, History Today, and The Conversation. Rosenfeld has been interviewed by, and had his work cited in, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, as well as programs on PBS and National Public Radio.

On September 1, 2022, Rosenfeld began his tenure as President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City.^[13] He is actively engaged in bolstering the Center's reputation as the world's largest Jewish archive by expanding its public programming and fellowship program. In April 2023, he helped launch the Jewish Public History Forum, which features major symposia on historical topics of contemporary relevance, such as fascism, Jews and democracy, and Zionism.^[14]