Samuel Kassow

Samuel D. Kassow (born October 3, 1946)^[1] is an American historian of the history of Ashkenazi Jewry.

Kassow was born in a displaced persons' camp in Stuttgart, Germany. His mother survived because she, along with her sister, was hidden in a dug-out underneath a barn on a classmate's family's farm; his father was arrested by the Soviets and spent the duration of the war in a Soviet prison camp.^[2][3] Kassow grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.^[4]

Kassow graduated from the Watkinson School in Hartford, Connecticut in 1962.^[5] In 1966, he earned his B.A. from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In 1968, Kassow earned a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. In 1976, he earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Kassow was the Charles Northam Professor at Trinity College for many years, until his retirement in 2025.^[6]

Kassow was a consultant to the Museum of History of the Polish Jews, which opened on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, and was responsible for two of the eight core exhibitions.^[7]

In his book, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto, Kassow speaks about the importance of preserving historical documents and the past. He describes the historical events going on during World War II in the 1940s that affected and eventually eliminated the Warsaw Ghetto. His main focus is the Ringelblum Archive created in absolute secrecy by a small group of people that lived in the Warsaw Ghetto which were uncovered and studied about ten years later.^[8]

In 2014, Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Museum published The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police, with an introduction by Kassow.

His 2007 book Who Will Write Our History was adapted into a documentary film of the same title, directed by Roberta Grossman and produced by Nancy Spielberg. It was released in 2018.

• Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917, University of California Press, 1989. ISBN 0-520-05760-0.
• Entre el zar y el pueblo: la búsqueda de una identidad pública en la Rusia zarista . Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, James L. West (eds.). Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1991. ISBN 0-691-03153-3.
• La vida singular de los judíos de Europa del Este, YIVO, Nueva York, 2004
• Quién escribirá nuestra historia: Emanuel Ringelblum y el archivo Oyneg Shabes, Indiana University Press, 2007
• El Holocausto en La historia del judaísmo de Cambridge, vol. VIII, páginas 633-671, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• El diario de Rudashevski , introducción. The Jewish Quarterly, 2025 ^{[ 9 ] [ 10 ]}

Kassow está casado con Lisa Pleskow Kassow. Ella es directora de Zach's Hillel en Trinity College. ^{[ 11 ]}

• Samuel Kassow at IMDb
• Samuel Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? - Review by Clara Weiss