Apply to the
Cooper Union

Professor Atina Grossmann is the 2024 Moses Mendelssohn Awardee

POSTED ON: May 13, 2024

Image of Atina Grossmann

Atina Grossmann, professor of history, received the 2024 Moses Mendelssohn Award earlier this winter. She accepted the award at the Center for Jewish History in New York City after delivering the 64th Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture. Her talk, entitled “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India,” was based on her most recent research, which unites a transnational approach to Jewish history with the specific story of Jewish refugees from Nazism in Iran and India. The work also drew on her own family history. 

The Moses Mendelssohn Award honors scholars who have made major contributions to the understanding of German-Jewish history. It is one of two awards bestowed by the Leo Baeck Institute - New York | Berlin. Previous recipient includes historian David Sorkin of Yale University and Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College. 

Additionally in April, Professor Grossmann delivered the 2024 Malka and Eitan Evan Annual Yom Ha-Shoah Lecture at the State University of New York at Albany Uptown Campus. The lecture was hosted by the university’s Judaic Studies Program.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.