Avinoam Patt

Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies | Director, Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, University of Connecticut

Avinoam J. Patt, PhD is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut. Until July 2019, he served as the Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he was also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization.  Previously, he worked as the Miles Lerman Applied Research Scholar for Jewish Life and Culture at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).  He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, May 2009); co-editor (with Michael Berkowitz) of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (USHMM/Alta Mira Press, September 2011).  He is also director of the In Our Own Words Interview Project with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary American Jewish fiction entitled The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction (Wayne State University Press, 2015). He is co-editor of a new volume on The Joint Distribution Committee at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (Wayne State, 2019) and is recently completed a new book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, to be published by Wayne State UP in Spring 2021). Together with David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, he is co-editor of a new volume Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (April 2020) and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2020).