Vicki Caron
Professor Emerita, Modern Jewish History
Cornell University

Vicki Caron is a Professor Emerita in History at Cornell University. Prior to the end of 2015, she served as the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University, where she held a joint appointment in History and Jewish Studies. Her work focuses on problems of Jewish assimilation and integration as well as the history of modern antisemitism, especially in the French and German contexts. 

She is author of Between France and Germany:  The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1988), and Uneasy Asylum:  France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford CA:  Stanford University Press, 1999), which in 1997 won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History.  This book has also appeared in a French translation as L’Asile Incertain:  Les Réfugiés Juifs en France, 1933-1942 (Paris:  Tallandier, 2008).  She has also coedited with Michael Brenner and Uri Kaufman a collection of essays, Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered:  The French and German Models (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2003), and she has served as guest editor of a special issue of the journal, French Politics, Culture and Society on the topic of “The Rescue of Jews in France and its Empire during World War II:  History and Memory,” which appeared in 2012.   She is currently working on a project titled “The Battle for the Republic:  Jewish-Catholic Relations in France, 1870-1918,” forthcoming, 2022.

Caron, who received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1983, has received fellowships from the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. She has also held the prestigious Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum during the 2004-2005 academic year, and during the 2008-2009 academic year she held the Walter Jackson Bate fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her book, Uneasy Asylum, won the 1997 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History (awarded by the Wiener Library, London, for the best unpublished book manuscript in contemporary European History).

Selected Publications

Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, l988).

Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; Paperback edition, 2001) This book has appeared in an updated French transl. in 2008 with Tallandier, Paris under the title L’Asile Incertain: Les Réfugiés Juifs en France, 1933-1942 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).

Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models, co-edited with Michael Brenner and Uri R. Kaufmann, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2003.

Guest Editor, Special Issue on “The Rescue of Jews in France and its Empire during World War II: History and Memory,” French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

“Catholics and the Rhetoric of Antisemitic Violence in fin-de siècle France,” in Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics,1880-1918, eds. Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, University Press of New England, 2014), pp. 36-60.

“Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in fin-de-siècle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” Journal of Modern History 81 (June, 2009), pp. 294-347.