Sheer Ganor is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's Department of History. She is currently completing her dissertation, In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment and the German-Jewish Diaspora, which studies the global network of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. She is the author of "Forbidden Words, Banished Voices: Jewish Refugees at the Service of BBC Propaganda to Wartime Germany," which was published in the Journal of Contemporary History in 2018. Sheer was a Leo Baeck Fellow during the year 2017-2018.
In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment, and the German-Jewish Diaspora
My dissertation traces the emergence and consolidation of the global diaspora of German-speaking Jews who escaped Nazi persecution in Central Europe. I argue that displaced German-speaking Jewry actively carved out spaces where it could maintain a German collective particularism informed by the historical experience of a Jewish minority group. Through a global comparative analysis that spans from 1933 to the end of the twentieth-century, my dissertation shows that this diaspora was defined by its subjects’ adherence to their shared cultural ethos, by the appearance of geographic distinctions between diasporic communities, and by the continuous confrontation with their shared past and with the world-historical circumstances that catalyzed their displacement.