Scholarship and Biography
Prof. Jockusch’s research and teaching focus on the social, political, cultural, and legal histories of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust and engage in comparative, transnational, and cross-disciplinary perspectives.
Her first book studied the beginnings of Holocaust research by Jews and from a Jewish perspective immediately after the liberation from Nazi rule. Based on unpublished archival records in various languages, it is the first comparative history of a number of documentation centers and historical commissions that pioneered Holocaust research in the wake of the Second World War. Comparing the cases of France, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, it retrieved from oblivion these first endeavors by Jews across Europe to write the history of the Holocaust and reappraised the earliest attempts to raise research questions and methodological problems that still have relevance for Holocaust and genocide studies today.
Jockusch’s ongoing research project investigates how Jews conceptualized legal redress after the unprecedented crime of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. It explores how Jewish individuals and organizations related to the Nuremberg trials and other Allied war crime trials in occupied Germany, and examines the multifaceted ways in which Jews sought to implement their ideas of justice in and outside of the Allied tribunals. She is also working on a book on the trials of Stella Goldschlag (aka Kuebler-Isaaksohn), a young German Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust because she became a Gestapo informer and was tried three times after the war: for "crimes against humanity" by a Soviet military court in 1946 and two West-German courts in 1957 and 1972 for "accessory to murder". Analyzing the complexities of Goldschlag’s rationalization of her wartime actions, the roles played by Holocaust survivors in bringing her to justice, the legal conceptualizations of her wrongdoing, and the ongoing German public discourse about Goldschlag's case, this project seeks to make original contributions to Holocaust and genocide studies, women’s and gender studies, German history, and the history of transitional justice.
Prior to coming to Brandeis in fall 2016, Jockusch taught at New York University, the University of Leipzig, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Haifa, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.