Paul Hanebrink

Senior Fellow (02/2026 – 07/2026)

Reconsidering the Memory of Antifascism

This projects targets antifascist memory culture in Austria, Hungary and Italy. Its purpose is not to rehabilitate stuffy and dated tales about long-dead heroes of the resistance. Instead, it aims at understanding antifascist memory in historical context: to reconsider the hopes invested in its creation as well as the disillusionment that it later bred; to treat its contradictions as productive of meaning rather than as errors of fact, and—most important of all—to ask what legacy these ambiguities leave for societies in Europe and North America that are once again debating the historical relationship between past struggles against persecution and the injustices and inequities that define our own time.

Initial guiding questions include: how did forms and institutions devised to mediate antifascist memory to wider publics circulate across national boundaries?; what role did Jewish leftists and the specter of “Jewish Communism” play in the lives and afterlives of these memorial practices?; and how did institutions charged with preserving and transmitting antifascist memory adapt to the rise of Holocaust memory on both sides of the Atlantic?

Paul Hanebrink is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick, where he has taught since 2001. He is the author of two books: In Defense of Christian Hungary. Religion, Nationalism, Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca, 2006) and A Specter Haunting Europe. The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 2018), which has also appeared in Italian and Romanian translations. In addition, he serves as a member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2014.

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