ELISABETH BECKER is a Freigeist Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Max-Weber-Institute-for-Sociology, Heidelberg University and a Faculty Fellow at Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. She has degrees from Cornell University, Oxford University and Yale University. Her first book, Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention (University of Chicago Press, 2021), offers a unique look into two of Europe's largest urban mosque communities, providing a complex picture of Muslim life, while highlighting the failures of European pluralism. Elisabeth's writing has been featured in The Washington Post, New England Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Tablet Magazine. She has been a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center of Bard College. She has taught a course on "Jewish Berlin Then and Now" for the Yivo institute for Jewish Studies in New York City.

Her second book, HEIMAT: The Moving Lives of Jewish Berlin, will be published in 2027 with Verso. This is an unprecedented narrative exploration of how continuity and rupture, time and place have shaped the lives of Berlin's Jews, and through them the city of Berlin as a center of diasporic Jewish life. Tracing the lives of five prominent Jewish Berliners: Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Max Liebermann, Mascha Kaléko, who each in their own way represent the flourishing Jewish diaspora of 20th century Berlin, drawing connections from their lives to the city's contemporary form. Publisher, Leo Hollis says: 'This is a deeply felt and movingly written book that combines history, memoir blended through walks through the modern-day city. It is a hugely timely book on the idea of home.'

ARTICLES:

The Tablet People of the Books (also featured in Lit Hub Daily 8 October 2021)

The Tablet The Jewcomer

A Beautiful Perspective Married to the Stranger Within Your Gates

The Washington Post Peace Baby or Trump Target? A Mother's Dream of Jewish-Muslim Unity Turns into Fear

The Washington Post Blinded by the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Muslims and American Jews overlook the need for domestic unity

Forward I Moved to Berlin and Found my Jewish Identity

Vocally My Family Trip To A Peach Farm Ended In A Painful Reminder That Anti-Semitism Is Alive & Well In America

The Washington Post, What it's like to see my husband's mosque set on fire