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Christin Zühlke's research focuses on the Jewish experience and responses to the Holocaust

Christin Zühlke has joined the 91ԭ�� for the 2025–2026 academic year as the inaugural Chaiken Postdoctoral Researcher in Jewish Studies. Her position is generously funded by the Department of History and Jewish Studies Program. Zühlke’s research focuses on Jewish experiences and responses to the Holocaust, with a specific emphasis on Yiddish, gender and religious aspects. Her research interests address Holocaust memory, Yiddish literature, culture, language, museums studies, pop culture, modern Jewish thought and practical ethics.

From 2023 until 2025, Zühlke was a postdoctoral research fellow in Holocaust Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a Ph.D. from the Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Her Ph.D. project analyzed the Yiddish writings of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau with an emphasis on Jewish cultural studies and Jewish — as well as Holocaust — literature. She studied Jewish studies, philosophy and German studies and has been a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, the University of California, Berkeley, and the German Historical Institute (Pacific Regional Office in Berkeley).

Zühlke co-published New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust (De Gruyter, 2023) and Die Nacht: Erinnerung und Zeugnis – Neu übersetzt (Verlag Herder, 2022), a new, annotated German translation of La Nuit by Elie Wiesel done in collaboration with the Elie Wiesel Research Center. She is an associate co-editor of the Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature and co-edits New Approaches to Teaching Holocaust Literature as well as the special issues “Agency and Absence: Zooming in on Men as Gendered Beings during the Holocaust” for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and “In the Void – (Non-)Representations of the Gas Chambers” for Holocaust Studies. She co-edits the Elie Wiesel Research Series of which the first volume will be published this winter as well as the annotated 24-volume edition of Elie Wiesel Werke (Works of Elie Wiesel) with its first volume being published next spring. Further, she is currently working on articles on gender and sexuality in Jewish pop culture and literature.

During the fall 2025 semester, Zühlke taught the new course, HIST/JWST327 Gender and the Holocaust and is teaching a survey course on Jewish history during the spring semester. In the gender and the Holocaust course, her students approached the Holocaust from multiple perspectives, such as written and oral testimonies, representations in film, literature and graphic novels to understand the role of gender. Nazi ideology, antisemitism, racism, othering, the persecution of LGBTQIA+ community members, various types of sexual(ized) relationships, and the actions of perpetrators, resisters, victims, etc. were all significantly influenced by gender and sexuality. Students analyzed historical documents and autobiographical narratives to understand how people experienced WWII and the Holocaust as gendered beings in Nazi Germany, in ghettos, and in concentration and death camps, in partisan units, and hiding. Students interrogate how Nazi ideology and propaganda are influenced by gender, for example, the image of “Volksdeutsche” and “enemies of the state” and the question of reproduction and family. Students examine how the intersectionality of gender and race influenced the experiences of different victim groups, such as Jews or Sinti and Roma. Furthermore, students critically interpret autobiographical narratives, such as diaries, to understand the gendered contexts in which they were written, circulated, translated and canonized, as well as their intended audience. These discussions will lead students to explore how gender also influenced the shaping of Holocaust memory.

During the spring semester, Zühlke is organizing a symposium, “Women and Yiddish – New Approaches to Gender, Sexuality, Language, and Culture” on Thursday, April 23.