Interview with GHI Visiting Fellow Sara Halpern

Sara Halpern is a historian of Modern European and Jewish history with expertise in migration, statelessness, humanitarianism, and minority–majority relations. She earned her PhD from The Ohio State University in 2020 with a dissertation that received the 2022 Best Dissertation Award from the Ohio Academy of History.

Her dissertation forms the basis of her current book manuscript, Saving the Unwanted: Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees and the Global Struggle for Humanitarianism, 1943–1949, now under peer review. This book draws on transnational and comparative archival methods, as well as political and sociological theory, to reconstruct the history of aid to Shanghai’s 15,000 Central European Jewish refugees. It argues that the ideals of postwar humanitarianism — even outside of Europe — were never fully realized due to competing cultural understandings of aid and persistent Western imperialism in geopolitical affairs.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the international Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on topics including the postwar trajectories of Central European Jewish refugees in Shanghai and San Francisco. Previously, she has held teaching appointments at St. Olaf College and Cardiff University. At the German Historical Institute, she is developing her second major project, Stateless by Design: Jewish Denationalization and Imperial Politics in Europe and Beyond.

Could you start by telling me a little bit about your academic career, your background, and what your specific research interests are? 

I received my BA in history from Colgate University, with a minor in Jewish Studies. As an undergrad, I had the opportunity to study at the Hebrew University in Israel. Afterward, I moved on to graduate school, which took me to Ann Arbor, where I did my MA in Judaic Studies, with a focus on American Jewish history. I took some time off to work on my German language and history in Berlin before I began work on my dissertation project on Shanghai’s Central European Jews at the Ohio State University, from where I received my PhD in 2020. Before I received my fellowship here at GHI, I was primarily teaching at St. Olaf College, mainly European history and a lot of German history. In between I taught at Cardiff University in the UK for a year. And now I’m in the post-doc phase. 

What initially drew you to the field of Jewish History?

It actually started in a very personal way for me. I grew up in an area of New Jersey where I was one of two Jewish kids in my class at school. Anywhere I went in my peer group, whether it was summer camp or school, I wondered, why are there only two Jewish kids? I was very confused why there weren’t more of us. I was first introduced to the Holocaust in about fifth grade. We read the novel Number the Stars by Lois Lowry about the escape of Danish Jews during the Second World War. It’s about a girl hoping to rescue her Jewish friend, and I was amazed to read a book featuring a Jewish girl like me. Then my grandmother took the opportunity not only to teach me about the Holocaust, but also about Jewish cultural traditions. My family celebrated the major Jewish holidays, but we did not observe Shabbat or other holidays. Once I got to college my interest in Jewish history grew. I had no idea that we had a history outside of the Holocaust. That was why I wanted to go to graduate school, to learn more about Jewish history, how it is taught and what research is being done. 

Your current research project is titled “Stateless by Design: Jewish Denationalization and Imperial Politics in Europe and Beyond.” Tell me a bit more about your project. What are the questions you are trying to answer? 

When I learned that historiography has claimed that the Denazification process in Germany was not successful, I was really intrigued by that. It was in the back of my head when I researched the emigration pathways for Shanghai’s Jewish refugees, many of them German or Austrian Jews who were classified as stateless by the Reich. Their choices were limited, and some of the choices were based on their citizenship or what kind of passport they had, if they had any. I wondered, how could you not have any kind of remedy for this situation by 1947/48, two or three years after the Allies had revoked all the Nazi laws as part of the Denazification process in September 1945? It really bothered me, especially since there was one episode where an Austrian consul came to Shanghai in spring 1948, as one observer said, “like Santa Claus with a bag of passports.” Because countries had conflicting immigration rules, the Austrian Jews were caught in a bind. For example, if they claimed citizenship, they would not be able to enter Australia because Australia and Austria had yet to sign a peace treaty. At the same time, citizenship offered protection until an option opened up. [A group of Austrian Jews were repatriated in January 1947] 

I was also interested in the Eleventh Decree of 1941 [Elfte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz, November 25, 1941], which formalized the statelessness of Jews abroad. The question I have is, why do scholars consider the 1935 Reich Citizenship Law as making Jews stateless when the Decree of 1941 formally does so? So I wanted to draw more attention to that. But what I have also found during this fellowship was that in 1933, the Denaturalization Law [Gesetz über den Widerruf von Einbürgerungen und die Aberkennung der deutschen Staatsangehörigkeit, July 14, 1933] became the basis for many actions by the Gestapo, who denaturalized individual Jews on a case-by-case basis. I am trying to understand the evolution of that history within Germany, from the beginning to the restoration of citizenship in 1949. I’m looking at the trajectory of statelessness within the German legal system. The Eleventh Decree specifically targeted Jewish refugees since it denationalized Jews outside the Reich’s borders, those who had left, who then became stateless wherever they were if the government in that country recognized German law at the time. So that is another question I am currently looking at, to what extent did the British Empire recognize the statelessness of the Jewish refugees within its territories? I'm unraveling more than I expected. 

You mentioned that you examine the British Empire's policy towards Jewish refugees who had become stateless. As “Empires and their Legacies” is our new research focus here at GHI, I’m curious to learn to what extent you have found in your research thus far that imperial interests influenced British policy towards these refugees at the time?

I’m still working that out. Compared to my first project, the research for this one is piecemeal, meaning that sources are like needles in a haystack. For the British, it was a question of how these denationalization laws fit into their imperial interests. I'm still trying to find documents that speak to these issues within the British Empire in archives in the UK. I do know a bit more about the postwar period since we have some more materials here in the U.S. My understanding – for that period – is that there was no blanket policy or order for the restoration of citizenship in occupied Germany; each sector handled the issue as it saw fit. I have found evidence that in the U.S. zone, you had to go to the state [Länder] government to ask for your citizenship to be restored. The British were conscious of the fact that there were many Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors in their zone who could not go to the United States [due to the immigration national quota system], but who might instead want to go to the Dominions within the British Empire such as Australia or Canada, which had very different immigration requirements. Another destination for stateless Jews within their zone was Palestine. Yet not all wanted to go to Palestine, even though the Balfour Declaration existed – a British promise that there would be a Jewish homeland, and Zionists interpreted that to mean Palestine — and there was a possibility of it becoming a Jewish state. A Jewish state would offer citizenship. 

Coming from these findings, there are a lot of interesting questions and comparisons, including the fact that Austria had a different approach than Germany to citizenship restoration. Theirs was still a provisional government at the time, but Austria was able to move forward and offer restoration of citizenship by 1948, a year ahead of Germany. 

I am also still trying to understand how the British Empire understood the fact that they did allow stateless children to come into the UK in 1938 under the assumption that their stay there would be temporary and that they would be sent back. That plan ultimately didn't work because the war broke out, but it saved thousands of lives. 

What I want to do through this lens of statelessness and thinking about imperial dominance and legacies is to ask how other states responded to the fact that they welcomed stateless Jews with the intention of eventually sending them back only to find out now they're somehow responsible for these people who can't go back. And then what did they do when that state collapsed? To be clear, having no nationality/citizenship means that one could not be deported. I think that through this lens, I'm going to be able to rewrite or reframe the history of the British Empire and Jewish refugees, including the Kindertransport. 

What kinds of sources do you use for your research? And what are some of the biggest challenges in researching your topic? 

Right now, I am primarily using institutional archives, which means I am reviewing a lot of policy documents, a lot of letters and other correspondence. I am also using oral history interviews and memoirs. I’m currently interviewing a 99-year old Jewish refugee who found refuge as a stateless person in Shanghai. It was my first chance to ask someone what it is like to be in that situation and have absolutely no legal protection. You can still feel the tension when they tell you, “we just didn't know what to do. We didn’t want to get into trouble, so we just did whatever we were told.” In Shanghai, families didn't even try to protest or challenge the authorities, they just did what they were told. In my interview with this man, we also talked about his sister's marriage to an American GI. He actually answered my question by saying, “she married a passport.” I remembered how my PhD advisor, Robin Judd, had talked about the fact that some Jewish brides who married GIs did so to obtain citizenship in her book, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust. The comment made by my interviewee has since made me think about what options stateless people have. What does a passport mean to them as opposed to some other identity document, or even having no documents at all? 

Statelessness is about mobility, not just crossing borders, but also about the rights within the environment you find yourself in such as employment and housing. The category of statelessness was so ambiguous during that time, it was not codified into international law until 1954 [Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons]. Until then, it was just an administrative category. Unless they were being explicitly told so, many German and Austrian Jewish refugees did not even know they were legally stateless. They called themselves exiles or refugees, but they did not use the term stateless until they were categorized as such. So that is my challenge while going through the oral history testimonies, going through the memoirs, to find some explicit statements on their citizenship or rights status as opposed to just their everyday survival as a refugee. 

Once the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (ICR) and the United Nations created the formal administrative category of “stateless person,” it could be selected as an option on official documents by those who did not want to identify as being citizens of somewhere. It was actually quite convenient for people from the Soviet Union – both Jews and others – who wanted to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union or elsewhere. 

The lack of explicit references within personal sources raises the methodological challenge of how to read between the lines. How did these refugees understand themselves as stateless in their life’s trajectory? And not just those who remained in transit. This is also why the British Empire is so interesting in this context. Many refugees became soldiers in the British Armed Forces and were subsequently granted British citizenship. I am curious to find out more about their motivation to join the British army and what it meant for them to obtain British citizenship. In my project, I am examining these questions from a social perspective, not just from the legal side. 

What kind of archival research or other work are you hoping to accomplish during your time here at the GHI Washington? 

I am hoping to continue my work at the National Archives, which holds all the files of the Office of the Military Government of the United States, OMGUS. I am using the American occupation zone to build a road map for when I go back to the British element. I have also been working at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. They have a fair amount of material from the Bundesarchiv, some of which is already digitized and available only on site, other materials take longer to find because there is almost no finding aid for them. I also had the opportunity to go to New York a couple of weeks ago to check on a few things at the United Nations archives before they close for the foreseeable future on June 1^st . 

How do you experience DC in general, both as a place for research and scholarly exchange but also as a place to live? 

I have always loved Washington, so I was very happy to come back here. I love how very cosmopolitan it is in terms of the focus on policy and politics, which are basically at the heart of my research. It is just so much easier to find like-minded people, even if they come from totally different sectors. For example, I went to an event on the 1980 Refugee Act over at Georgetown University recently, and I was probably the only historian in the room. It was really exciting to meet people who worked for Refugees International or for the United Nations, UNHVR [UN High Commissioner for Refugees]. There was somebody who worked for the Bureau of Population and Migration at the State Department [the office was closed in July 2025]. It is just really nice to be able to think about my work in a different context. The event made me think about what the role of a historian is today. What are we doing with our research? Why do we matter? It is interesting how our brains work when we go to an event on a contemporary topic. For me, as a historian, Washington is where my work intersects with political reality, and it makes me think about the ways in which my work can be relevant. 

You explained how your research intersects not just with legal history, but also with questions of policy and political science, so I wonder whether you would describe your work as interdisciplinary?

Absolutely, I have always been an interdisciplinary thinker. I attribute that to my liberal arts education at Smith College and Colgate. Growing up, I was always very interested in how the world works and how everything is connected. It was why social studies was my favorite subject in school, because it was about connecting the pieces of our world, our human society. I also liked physics a lot, to me it is just fascinating to see the mechanics of how things work. I think being more of a systems thinker has helped me to be open to different disciplines and to how theories and methods from different disciplines can strengthen my own work. I do that in my own teaching as well. I did my PhD in history, not political science or sociology, because I wanted to use history as a way to interact with all of these disciplines. An interdisciplinary approach really helps my students—who are usually not history majors—connect with the past. I try to get students to see themselves as being part of the past and connect to that. To me, if they get it, then I've just won my day. 

Finally, what do you like to do when you are not working on your project? 

I love running, which is another reason I love living here in Washington – all the trails, you can run for miles. I used to run marathons. I was really hoping to do the Delaware marathon this month, but I injured my ankle when I moved here, so I need to sit this one out. I also really like to cook, and like everybody at GHI, I love going to museums. In my past stays here in DC, I used to go to all the Smithsonian museums, but this time I'm trying to be more intentional about visiting smaller museums. For example, I recently went to the new Museum of the Palestinian People on 18th Street. I found out about it through Art Walk Dupont Circle. Having been in DC on and off for the last 20 years, it is a joy to see how this city has evolved. Also, I love to travel and experience a bit of local life in other countries. My parents aren’t wrong when they say. “You give our children a passport, they go!”