Michael
Casper
New York Public Library
Jody Ellant and Howard Reiter Family Fellowship
Research Topic
Housing the Nation: Jews and Public Housing in Twentieth-Century America
Bio
Michael Casper is a historian of modern Eastern European Jewish politics and culture. At the Katz Center, he will examine the Jewish role in planning, theorizing, and inhabiting public housing in 20th-century America.
Casper received his PhD in history at UCLA with a dissertation titled “Strangers and Sojourners: The Politics of Jewish Belonging in Lithuania, 1914-1940.” He has previously held fellowships at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Posen Foundation.
Selected publications
- with Nathaniel Deutsch, A Fortress in Brooklyn: Hasidic Williamsburg from White Flight to Gentrification (Yale University Press, forthcoming)
- “‘Principled Diasporism’: Folkists, Zionists and the Meaning of Doikayt,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 17 (forthcoming)
