Samuel Kassow - Biography

Dr. Samuel D. Kassow (born 1946) is an American historian of the history of Ashkenazi Jewry. He was born in a displaced persons' camp in Stuttgart, Germany. His mother survived because a classmate hid her and her sister in a cave underneath the barn on his family's farm, his father was arrested by the Russians and spent the duration of the war in a Soviet prison camp. He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Kassow earned his B.A. from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut , in 1966, his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics in 1968, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976. He is married to Lisa Kassow, director of the Zachs Hillel House at Trinity College. He has two teenage daughters named Miri and Serena. Kassow was the Charles Northam Professor at Trinity College for many years. He is a consultant to the Museum of History of the Polish Jews which is planned to open on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.

In his books, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto and Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Kassow speaks about the importance of preserving historical documents and the past. He describes the historical events going on during World War Two in the 1940’s that affected and eventually eliminated the Warsaw Ghetto. His main focus is the three archives created in absolute secrecy by a small group of people that lived in the Warsaw Ghetto which were uncovered and studied about ten years later.

Books

• Students, Professors, and the State inTsarist Russia: 1884-1917, University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 0-520-05760-0.

• Between Tsar and People: the Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, James L. West eds. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1991. ISBN 0-691-03153-3.

• The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry, YIVO, New York 2004

• Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007