Amos Morris-Reich

Amos Morris-Reich, by Vardi Kahana, 2022

Amos Morris-Reich is a scholar whose research intersects modern Jewish history and the history of modern science and technology.

Biography

Amos Morris-Reich received his BA in Jewish History in 1995 (Summa cum Laude), and, following a direct doctoral program, his PhD (Summa cum Laude) under the joint supervision of Sander Gilman, Eli Lederhendler, and Gabriel Motzkin in 2005 from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  

Academic career

After postdocs at the University of Chicago; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Ben Gurion University; The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; and the Polonsky Academy at Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Morris-Reich was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Jewish History and Thought, the University of Haifa, from 2008 to 2015. From 2015 to 2019, Morris-Reich was an Associate Professor there.

In 2013 to 2014, Morris-Reich was the Academic Coordinator in the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.

From 2009 to 2018, Morris-Reich was the Director of The Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society, The University of Haifa.

In 2019 Morris-Reich became an Associate Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. From 2020 he is the Director of The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University and from 2021 he is a Full Professor at the Cohn Institute and The Geza Roth Chair of Modern Jewish History.

Books and research

Amos Morris-Reich’s book Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth Century Cases (Philadelphia: UPENN, 2022) turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine, on “Jewish and Arab types”; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and Solomon Yudovin’s photographs in S. An-sky’s attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Photography and Jewish History attempts to move the discussion of photography and Jewish history nexus from Jewish visibility and Jewish photographers to the political categories and registers of twentieth-century Jewish history.

In his book Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), Morris-Reich attempted to return photography and photographic techniques and methods used in the study of “race” in a variety of scientific fields and disciplines back into the history of science. Approaching the history of scientific racial photography from an historical epistemology point of view, as forms of scientific evidence, Morris-Reich examines numerous scientists and scholars, both prominent and obscure, who developed photographic methods and techniques for the study of race or made methodical use of photography for its study. His reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and emergent patterns points to the diversity of and transformations in the scientific status of photography as evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the Weimar and Nazi periods, and beyond, from physical anthropology to phenomenology.

In his book The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science (New York: Routledge, 2008), Morris-Reich explores the connections between academic disciplines and notions of Jewish assimilation which, implicitly, pointed to the future trajectory of the Jewish minority in modern societies. Focusing on two influential "assimilated" Jewish authors—anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel—this comparative study shows that the respective epistemological and ontological assumptions, considerations, and expectations of anthropology and sociology underlie the respective evaluations of the Jews’ assimilation outcome in German and American societies as a form of "group extinction" in anthropology or as a form of “in-between situation” in sociology.

Morris-Reich has also co-edited (with Dirk Rupnow), Ideas of “Race” in the History of the Humanities (New York: Palgrave, 2017) and (with Margaret Olin), Photography and Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2019). He edited the first collection of essays by Georg Simmel in Hebrew: Georg Simmel: "How is Society Possible?" and Other Essays (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibutz ha-meuchad, 2012) and the first collection of essays by Sander Gilman in Hebrew: The Jewish Body and Other Protruding Organs: A Selection of Essays by Sander Gilman (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015).  

With a special interest in the history of methodology and epistemology, Morris-Reich has also published numerous articles on the conceptual history of the social sciences, history of antisemitism and racism, Jewish cultural history, history of photography, and biologically oriented human sciences. At the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of the Science and Ideas his teaching and supervision focus on the history and philosophy of the social and human sciences, history and philosophy of photography and technology, and historical contingency and counterfactuals.