Amos Morris-Reich

Amos Morris-Reich is a history professor at Tel Aviv University whose research involves the intersection of modern Jewish history and the history of modern science and technology.

The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science

In his 2012 book The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science, Morris-Reich explores the connections between academic disciplines and notions of Jewish assimilation which, implicitly, pointed to the future trajectory of the Jewish minority in modern societies. Focusing on two influential "assimilated" Jewish authors—anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel—this comparative study intends to show that the respective epistemological and ontological assumptions, considerations, and expectations of anthropology and sociology underlie the respective evaluations of the Jews' assimilation outcome in German and American societies as a form of "group extinction" in anthropology or as a form of "in-between situation" in sociology.

Race and Photography

In his 2016 book Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 Morris-Reich attempts to return photography and photographic techniques and methods used in the study of race in a variety of scientific fields and disciplines back into the history of science. Approaching the history of scientific racial photography from an historical epistemology point of view, as forms of scientific evidence, Morris-Reich examines numerous scientists and scholars who developed or made use of photographic methods and techniques for the study of race. His reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and emergent patterns points to the diversity of and transformations in photography's scientific status from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the Weimar and Nazi periods and beyond, from physical anthropology to phenomenology.

Photography and Jewish History

Morris-Reich's 2022 book Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth Century Cases turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn's utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the failed project of Helmar Lerski, a prominent photographer in Mandatory Palestine, on "Jewish and Arab types"; photography in the career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and Solomon Yudovin's photographs in S. Ansky's attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. The book attempts to move discussion of the photography and Jewish history nexus from Jewish visibility and photographers to the political categories and registers of twentieth-century Jewish history.

Other works

Morris-Reich has co-edited with Dirk Rupnow, for Ideas of "Race" in the History of the Humanities and with Margaret Olin, for Photography and Imagination. He edited the first collection of essays by Georg Simmel in Hebrew: Georg Simmel: "How is Society Possible?" and Other Essays and the first collection of essays by Sander Gilman in Hebrew: The Jewish Body and Other Protruding Organs: A Selection of Essays by Sander Gilman.  

With a special interest in the history of methodology and epistemology, Morris-Reich has also published numerous articles on the conceptual history of the social sciences, history of antisemitism and racism, Jewish cultural history, history of photography, and biologically oriented human sciences. At the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of the Science and Ideas his teaching and supervision focus on the history and philosophy of the social and human sciences, history and philosophy of photography and technology, and historical contingency and counterfactuals.