Alex Scheepens is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his BA in International Relations and History in 2014, and his MA in European Studies in 2016 and his MA in European Studies in 2016, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed another MA in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021. His teaching and research interests range from topics in modern European Jewish history and the Holocaust to the history of antisemitism, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
Scheepens’s dissertation, supervised by Professors Kathryn Ciancia and Tony Michels, addresses an understudied aspect of Dutch Holocaust history, that is, the varied and multifaceted experiences of Jews hiding in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. While existing literature has predominantly emphasized the high victimization percentage of Dutch Jewry in the Shoah, it has notably neglected the everyday life experiences of those Jewish individuals who sought to escape the Nazi deportations and find refuge among their non-Jewish countrymen. Scheepens seeks to reconstruct the Jewish experience and show how Jews living under the German occupation were dynamic historical actors whose decisions and responses were influenced by factors on the individual, community, and national levels, as well as by their immediate surroundings, allowing them to navigate the various challenges, take advantage of the presented opportunities, and cope with countless different feelings and conditions.