Anson rabinbach wiki youtube

He was His ex-wife, Jessica Benjamin, said the death, in a hospital, was from complications of a heart attack. Professor Rabinbach pronounced RAB-in-bock was among several young scholars in the early s who attempted to bridge the gap between social history and the often abstruse world of intellectual history, especially in the realm of 20th-century Europe.

Such a position put Professor Rabinbach at odds with many older historians of modern Europe, not to mention the intellectual climate in Germany, which was still years away from grappling with the true meaning of the Holocaust.

Boston globe obituaries

The rise of the Third Reich, many believed, was driven by economics and politics; ideas were irrelevant. Frustrated by a lack of places in which to express his views, in Professor Rabinbach and three other academics — David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen and Jack Zipes — founded the journal New German Critique. It quickly became a leading outlet for scholars of 20th-century German culture, including film, theater and social movements, and it broached the subject of antisemitism — before, during and after the Nazi era — which was still taboo in Germany.

The journal helped introduce Anglophone readers to postwar German thinkers like Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin, often by translating their work into English for the first time. Huyssen, a historian at Columbia, said in an interview. Professor Rabinbach was perhaps best known for a work that on its face seemed to have little to do with Nazism.

Such considerations, he showed, fueled progressive reforms, but also the intense focus on health, beauty and racial purity by fascist movements. Before coming to America, his father took part in the short-lived communist revolution of in Germany and later spent a year in the Soviet Union. To pay for college, he worked summers in the resorts around the Catskill Mountains — including, for a brief time, as a joke thief.

It was plagiarism, basically. He graduated with a degree in history, then enrolled in the doctoral history program at the University of Wisconsin. He intended to study medieval Europe, but an encounter with a book by Dr.