Lauren Crawford

Lauren Crawford is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in Modern European history at Yale. Her dissertation, “Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the ‘War on Terror’ in Germany,” concerns the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia in postwar Germany. It traces how a range of actors defined and understood different forms of antisemitism—secondary antisemitism, anti-Americanism as antisemitism, feminist anti-Judaism, and “new” or “imported” antisemitism—, and documents how these discourses on antisemitism overlapped with, and at times generated, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism. Drawing on print media and social movement archives across Germany, the dissertation shows that these discourses were tightly connected to debates among leftists and feminists on increasing western intervention in the so-called “Muslim world,” from the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War, the first Gulf War, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, through the formal commence of the War on Terror in the early 2000s. It argues that the key concepts of Holocaust memory culture— the uniqueness ascribed to the Holocaust and the political lessons derived from it— emerged during, and were defined by, these debates. In reconstructing them, the dissertation reconceptualizes how Holocaust memory became the basis for the reunified German state’s liberal humanist ethical commitments, encapsulated in the language of “never again” and denoting the right to be free from violence.

 

Lauren has served as the co-chair of the Modern Europe Colloquium and as the coordinator of the Approaches to Recent and Contemporary History Working Group. Her research has been generously supported by the Fox Fellowship, the Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German American Fulbright Commission, and Yale’s MacMillan Center. She received the 2025 Konrad Jarausch Graduate Essay Prize in Central European History for the first chapter of her dissertation.

 

Prior to doctoral studies, Lauren received a BA in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College and an MSt in History from the University of Oxford. She also worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Rodewisch, Germany, and as an educator at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, where she is from.