Kerry Wallach

In Professor Wallach's courses, students learn about Germans, Jews, literature, history, film, art, and visual culture. Several of her courses deal with antisemitism and the Holocaust. At Gettysburg, she is an Affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program and also contributes to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Cinema & Media Studies.

Kerry Wallach's research focuses on twentieth-century Germany and German-Jewish culture. She is the author of Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State University Press, 2024) and Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2017), and co-editor of German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations (with Aya Elyada; Berghahn Books, 2023). Her articles on German-Jewish literature, history, film, and visual culture have appeared in German Studies Review, The German Quarterly, and Feminist German Studies, and in edited volumes including The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic and Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film. 

She is pleased to serve on the editorial board of the German Jewish Cultures book series published by Indiana University Press.

Her research has been supported by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, Association for Jewish Studies, and the Leo Baeck Institute New York.

Publications

“Cultural Erasure, Shortages, and Synthetics: Women’s Stories of Hardship and Exclusion,” Monatshefte 119.3 (forthcoming fall 2027). In special issue on “My Life in Germany Before and After 1933 Archive,” edited by Daniel Weidner and Bianca Pick.

Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2024.

German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations. Co-edited with Aya Elyada. New York: Berghahn Books, 2023.

“When Feminism and Antisemitism Collide.” Special issue (co-edited with Sonia Gollance) of Feminist German Studies 39.1 (July 2023).

“Buy Me a Mink: Jews, Fur, and Conspicuous Consumption.” In Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America, edited by Paul Lerner, Uwe Spiekermann, and Anne Schenderlein, 133–58. Worlds of Consumption Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 

“Visual Weimar: The Iconography of Social and Political Identities.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic, edited by Nadine Rossol and Benjamin Ziemann, 724–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

“Digital German-Jewish Futures: Experiential Learning, Activism, and Entertainment.” In The Future of the German Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin, 239–51. Purdue, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021.

“The Jewish Vamp of Berlin: Actress Maria Orska, Typecasting, and Jewish Women.” In Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film, edited by Valerie Weinstein and Barbara Hales, 72–92. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020.

“Jews and Gender” in Forum “Feminism in German Studies,” The German Quarterly 91.2 (Spring 2018): 209–11.

Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.

“America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions of American Poverty in Serialized Novels by Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, and Michael Gold.” In Three-Way Street: Germans, Jews, and the Transnational, edited by Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris, 197–219. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016.

“Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner and Jewish Disappearance in Der träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932),” German Studies Review 38.1 (2015): 17–34.