Deborah Hertz

Her second book is How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (Yale, 2007). It examines the frequency and significance of Jewish conversion to the Lutheran faith from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. This book has also been translated into German under the title Wie Juden Deutsche wurden: Die Welt jüdischer Konvertiten vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, published by Campus Verlag.

Since 2004, she has taught at the University of California, San Diego, as a professor of history and is the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Holocaust Living History Workshop at UCSD, a joint project of the UCSD Library and the Jewish Studies Program.

Hertz's first book, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (Yale, 1988 and Syracuse, 2005). It traces the rise and decline of Jewish salons in Berlin at the close of the eighteenth century. Jewish High Society appeared in a German edition called Die jüdischen Salons im alten Berlin, published by Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag. A new edition of the German translation with a new preface appeared in July 2018, published by the Europäische Verlagsanstalt.

In addition, Deborah Hertz edited letters written by the Jewish writer Rahel Varnhagen to her friend and writer Rebecca Friedländer: Briefe an eine Freundin: Rahel Varnhagen an Rebecca Friedländer (Cologne, 1988 and 2018).

After a year teaching at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, Hertz moved to the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1979 and remained there until 1996. In that year she accepted a position at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Hertz joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego as the Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies in 2004.

Deborah Hertz (born February 9, 1949), is an American historian whose specialties are modern German history, modern Jewish history and modern European women's history. Her current research focuses on the history of radical Jewish women.

Deborah Hertz was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1949 and graduated from Highland Park Senior High School in 1967. She attended New York University for two years and studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for her Junior Year Abroad in 1969–70. She then returned to the United States and graduated with a major in Humanities, summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota in 1971. She remained at the University of Minnesota and received her PhD in German history in 1979.