Steve Hochstadt

Steve Hochstadt is emeritus professor of history at Illinois College, after teaching there 2006-2016, and at Bates College 1979-2006. His first book, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989 (1999), won the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association. Sources of the Holocaust (2004) is a documents collection widely used in Holocaust courses. His grandparents fled from Vienna to Shanghai in 1939. His interviews with former Jewish refugees who went to Shanghai are the basis for two books: Shanghai-Geschichten: Die jüdische Flucht nach China (2007), and Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich (2012). He has spoken widely about the growing interest in China in Jewish history and especially the history of Jews in China, and is a member of the new International Advisory Board of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. He is the treasurer of the Sino-Judaic Institute, a pioneer in the scholarship of and support for Chinese-Jewish relations for the past 30 years. Many of his weekly columns for the Jacksonville (IL) Journal-Courier appear in Freedom of the Press in Small-Town America: My Opinions (2020). His most recent book is Death and Love in the Holocaust: The Story of Sonja and Kurt Messerschmidt (2021), about the survival of two Berlin Jews who married in Theresienstadt, and survived Auschwitz, slave labor and death marches.