Otto Dov Kulka
Otto Dov Kulka (1933–2021) was an Israeli historian and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specialized in modern antisemitism, Jewish thought in Europe, Jewish–Christian relations, the history of Jews in Germany, and the Holocaust.
Kulka was born Otto Deutelbaum in Nový Hrozenkov, Czechoslovakia. He survived the Holocaust: his father was killed early, and he and his mother were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother died in a concentration camp in 1945. In 1946, the family changed their surname to Kulka. He moved to Israel in 1949, joined Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi, and added the Hebrew name Dov.
He studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Goethe University Frankfurt. His doctoral thesis, completed in 1975, was The Jewish Question in the Third Reich. He joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1966, became associate professor in 1985, and full professor in 1991. He also spent a year as a Visiting Professor at Harvard (1984–85) and held the Sol Rosenbloom Chair in Jewish History. He retired in 1999 after a cancer diagnosis but continued his research.
Kulka is known for a broad, methodical approach to Nazism and the Holocaust. He argued that the study of the Jews under Nazism should be treated like any other long historical period, focusing on three interrelated topics: Nazi ideology and policy toward the Jews; how the German public viewed the regime’s Jewish policy; and the Jewish community and its leadership. He warned against narrowing the story to a single event, such as the Holocaust, and preferred the term “the history of the Jews under the National-Socialist regime,” with “the Final Solution” as the clear teleological aim of Nazi policy.
Among his major contributions is a documentary project about German Jewry, based on archives of the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (the National Representation of the Jews in Germany) and its successor Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland. He showed that German Jewry had an organized center before 1933 and continued to function under Nazi rule, with the regime gradually removing Jews from social life. He and collaborators also produced extensive studies showing that many ordinary Germans supported expelling Jews, a phenomenon he described as “abyssal indifference.”
Kulka’s books include Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus (German Jewry under the National-Socialist Regime) (1997) and its English edition. In 2013–2014 his widely discussed memoir-like work, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination, was published in several languages. In this book, he reflects on his own experiences in the camps while maintaining a historian’s perspective. The work won the Geschwister-Scholl Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Kulka also wrote about the sixteenth-century Prague Jewish thinker Maharal, linking his ideas to broader questions of nationhood and education. He helped organize international scholarly events and remained active in the field even after retirement. His death occurred in Jerusalem in 2021, leaving a lasting impact on Holocaust studies and the history of German Jewry.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:01 (CET).