Ph.D. Candidate in History, Brown University, USA
Adam J. Sacks holds a Master of Arts from Brown University, a Master of Science (High Honors) from the City College of the City University of New York, and a Bachelor of Arts, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University.
In 2011-2012, he was the Cahnmann Foundation Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and was awarded the Dissertation Grant of the Central European History Society.
In 2012-2013, he served as a Leo Baeck Programme Fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and as a guest researcher at the new Research Center for Exile Culture at the Universitaet der Kuenste in Berlin.
He has an essay forthcoming in the Association for Judaic Studies Review this spring, entitled “Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann Controversy as Destabilizing Transatlantic Text.”
By focusing on the exemplary cultural leadership of Dr. Kurt Singer, the dissertation project of Mr. Sacks investigates cultural activism as an engagement with the social and psychological duress of Nazi persecution. As the initiator and director of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Cultural Bund of the German Jews) in 1933, then active in Amsterdam (1938-1943) and finally Theresienstadt (1943-1944), Singer’s trajectory during the Shoah sheds new light on these distinct areas of Jewish cultural expression amidst the Shoah.
Crucial to understanding Singer’s leadership choices during the Shoah were his commitments and training prior to 1933, notably the Social Democratic movement and his devotion to thinking music medically through the Doctors Chorus, which he also created and led from 1913 until 1938. This dissertation argues that the cultural leadership of Kurt Singer went beyond the immediate needs of emergency self-help, and rather developed into a new cultural movement that would rethink the form, content and purpose of Jewish involvement in European culture.