BRENNER, Michael 1964-

PERSONAL: Born January 4, 1964, in Weiden, Germany; son of Hermann and Henny (Wolf) Brenner; married Ilana Zahavi, August 10, 1988; divoced, 1999; children: Simone. Education: Attended Hebrew University, 1987-88; Heidelberg College of Jewish Studies, M.A., 1988; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1994. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Office—Abteilung für Jedische Geschichte und Kultur, Historisches Seminar, Universität München, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany.

CAREER: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, visiting assistant professor of Jewish history, 1993-94; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, assistant professor of modern Jewish history, 1994-97; Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, assistant director, 1995-97; University of Munich, Munich, Germany, professor of Jewish history and culture, 1997—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Oldenburg Youth Book Prize, 1983.

WRITINGS:

Am Beispiel Weiden: Jüdischer Alltag im Nationalsozialismus, Arena (Würzburg, Germany), 1983.

Nach dem Holocaust: Juden in Deutschland, 1945-1950, C. H. Beck (Munich, Germany), 1995, translated as After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1997.

The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.

(Coauthor) German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Volume 2: 1780-1871, edited by Michael A. Meyer, C. H. Beck (Munich, Germany), 1996, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Derek Penslar) Circles of Community: Collective Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1932, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1998.

(Editor, with Derek Penslar) In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1998.

(Editor, with Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter) Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, M. Siebeck (Tübingen, Germany), 1999.

(Editor, with Yfaat Weiss) Zionistische Utopie, israelische Realität: Religion und Nation in Israel, C. H. Beck (Munich, Germany), 1999.

(Editor, with Stefan Rohrbacher) Wissenschaft vom Judentum: Annäherungen nach dem Holocaust, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Göttingen, Germany), 2000.

Zionism: A Brief History, translated by Shelley Frisch, Markus Wiener Publishers (Princeton, NJ), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Modern Jewish historiography.

SIDELIGHTS: Michael Brenner once told CA: "I began writing history when I was a high school student in Germany and composed an essay on Jewish life during the Nazi period in the small Bavarian town where I grew up after the war. This essay, which won a national award, became my first book before I graduated from high school, and it certainly influenced my later career in a most crucial way. I was immediately fascinated with both research and writing, having in the process also discovered details about the fate of my own family during the Holocaust. I went on to study history and Jewish Studies, and continued to write. Over the years, I have gained more distance to my topics, but in some way I always feel it rather advantageous for engaged writing to have a personal relation to one's subject matter."