Jules Riegel

Jules Riegel (they/them) is a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Their book project, In the Season of Hunger and Plague: Musical Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, reconstructs how a community facing existential crisis used music to define and contest its social and cultural identity. Their research interests include modern Polish-Jewish cultural history, music’s role in Jewish life, and gender and sexuality during the Holocaust. Their scholarship has been supported by a Harry Starr Fellowship in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies; a Fulbright Institute of International Education Grant to Warsaw, Poland; and a Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Sosland Fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. Their publications include a forthcoming article in Jewish Social Studies on beggars’ music in the Warsaw Ghetto and an article on the musician, ethnographer, and journalist Menachem Kipnis in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. They received their Ph.D. in Modern European History at Indiana University Bloomington.