Sven-Erik Rose

Sven-Erik Rose’s teaching and research focus on literature and intellectual history by European Jewish authors writing in German, French, and Yiddish. His first book, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848 (Brandeis University Press, 2014) was awarded the Association of Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought; a Russian translation is currently being prepared with Academic Studies Press. He has published widely in the field of Holocaust Studies, including articles on French-language Holocaust novels by Piotr Rawicz and Patrick Modiano; writings from Nazi ghettos grappling with the experience of hunger; and the Cold War reception of the clandestine Warsaw Ghetto archive “Oyneg Shabes.” With David Bathrick, he co-edited an issue of New German Critique exploring “Ambivalent Sites of Memory in Postwar Germany,” and with Jennifer Geddes he is the co-editor of Lessons and Legacies XVII: Languages of the Holocaust, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. His 2025 book Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettos (Brandeis University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) is the first monograph devoted entirely to literary writing by inmates of these Nazi ghettos. His current book project examines real-time reflections by victims of the Holocaust on the tortured status of ethical frameworks in the face of the extreme violence and, ultimately, genocide they were witnessing. One portion of this study, “Ethics in Collapse: The Warsaw Ghetto Writings of Yitskhok Bernshteyn,” is forthcoming in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Rose has also contributed the chapter “Literary Writing in Extremis in Nazi Ghettos in Poland” to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature.