Prof. Yfaat Weiss teaches at the Department for the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry since 2008. She is acting as the director of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Center since 2010, and as the Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish history and Culture at Leipzig University since 2017.
Between 2008 and 2011 she served as head of the School of History and in 2015 as Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Humanities. She is also a board member of the I-Core Center "Daat Hamakom" for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World.
Prof. Weiss began her studies at Hamburg University in Germany, where she specialized in German-Jewish history. In her doctoral dissertation, written at Tel Aviv University, she investigated the reciprocal relations between German Jewry and Polish Jewry following the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. In the late 1990s she taught at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and between 2000 and 2007 served as head of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at Haifa University.
Alongside her work in Israel she has spent time over the past decade as a visiting scholar at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin, the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Remarque Institute at NYU, the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, the Social Science Research Center Berlin, and the Europe Institute at Stanford University.
Her research operates in three arenas: German and Central European history, Jewish history, and Israeli history. It engages questions of citizenship, migration and sovereignty, as well as cultural heritage and transfer of knowledge, in comparative and spatial perspectives. Prof. Weiss works have won her the Hanna Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2012 and the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines in 2015.
Selected publications:
Ulrich Bielefeld & Yfaat Weiss, "…als Gelegenheitsgast, ohne jedes Engagement…". Jean Améry, München: Fink, 2014.
Amir Eshel & Yfaat Weiss (eds.), Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge: Zum Werk Barbara Honigmanns, München: Fink, 2013.
Yfaat Weiss, Lea Goldberg, Lehrjahre in Deutschland 1930-1933, Toldot – Essays zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010.
Mahmoud Yazbak & Yfaat Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948. Narratives of a Mixed City, Hague: Republic of Letters, 2012.
Yfaat Weiss, A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s lost Heritage, New York: Colombia University Press, 2011.
Daniel Levy & Yfaat Weiss, (eds.), Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, New York: Berghahn, 2002.
Yfaat Weiss, Staatsbürgerschaft und Ethnizität. Deutsche und polnische Juden am Vorabend des Holocaust, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. München: Oldenbourg, 2000.