Philip Friedman – Toward an Intellectual Biography
On May 26, 2026, Dr Natalia Aleksiun will give a scholarly seminar entitled Philip Friedman – Toward an Intellectual Biography.
This seminar will focus on reconstructing the intellectual biography of Philip Friedman as a historian of social and economic history, a graduate of the University of Vienna, a representative of the milieu of Jewish historians in interwar Poland, and an educator. The point of departure will be an analysis of his position within prewar and postwar intellectual networks, which shaped both his scholarly methodology and the directions of his historiographical inquiry. Attention will be devoted to the postwar transformation of his scholarship, when he emerged as one of the pioneers of Holocaust studies, notably as director of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland and as the author of the earliest monograph devoted to the fate of Lviv’s Jews. The seminar will seek to capture both continuities and ruptures in his academic work, as well as the relationship between his earlier research interests and his later engagement with the study of the Holocaust. Drawing on archival research conducted in Poland and abroad, the seminar will also serve as a space for methodological reflection on the possibilities and limitations of writing the intellectual biography of a scholar who left behind only sparse personal materials, and whose work must therefore be reconstructed primarily through dispersed sources and institutional contexts.
Natalia Aleksiun is a historian, holding a PhD in History from the University of Warsaw and in Jewish Studies from New York University. She is Professor of Jewish History at the University of Florida, where she holds the Harry Rich Professorship in Holocaust Studies. She collaborates with the Filip Friedman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Łódź. She has held fellowships at, among others, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Vienna. In addition to dozens of articles published in Polish and international scholarly journals, she is the author of Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce 1944–1950 (Warsaw, 2002) and Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (London, 2021). She has co-edited three volumes of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry: on Holocaust memory (vol. 20), Jewish historiography (vol. 29), and Jewish childhood (vol. 36), as well as a special issue of European Holocaust Studies entitled Places, Spaces and Voids in Holocaust Studies (2021). She has also co-edited the volumes Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023) and The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2024). Together with Marion Kaplan, she co-edited volume three of The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (2025), devoted to the victims of the Holocaust. She has published a critical edition of The Extermination of the Żółkiew Jews by Gerszon Taffet (2019). She is currently preparing monographs on the experiences of Jews in hiding in Eastern Galicia and on the so-called “corpse affair” in East-Central Europe.
Photo: Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem. 1427/223