Katherine Lebow is a Jewish historian, Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford based in the United Kingdom. She holds a faculty position in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, paired with a fellowship at Christ Church. Lebow’s research centers on 20th-century Polish social history, autobiographical narratives of working-class populations, everyday life under Stalinism, and transnational Jewish history. Prior to her appointment at Oxford, she held academic positions at the College of Charleston, the University of Virginia, and Newcastle University, alongside a visiting fellowship at the European University Institute (EUI).
Throughout her academic tenure, Lebow has focused on “history from below,” publishing her seminal monograph Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56, which analyzes the social dynamics of post-WWII Polish industrial spaces. Her longitudinal research projects explore the autobiographical writings of marginalized populations—including unemployed workers, peasants, and Polish Jews—in pre-WWII Eastern Europe. Within academia, she has consistently advocated for maintaining archival integrity and supporting historical scholarship that resists dogmatic institutional appropriation.
After the October 2023, Katherine Lebow mobilized alongside independent Jewish intellectuals to co-sign collective manifestos; as an active member of Na’amod—a organization campaigning to end British Jewish support for Israeli occupation—she frequently co-signs open letters or publishes articles expressing solidarity with Palestine, while actively opposing attempts by mainstream institutional entities to monopolize Jewish representation and equate Palestinian solidarity with antisemitism.
She explained the history, emphasizing that Zionism was not a Jewish tradition: “Zionism was a minority political position until the post-World War II period. There were strong anti-Zionist currents in the Jewish labor movement and many religious Jews opposed it on theological grounds. The British Jewish establishment was also skeptical; in the 1930s, for instance, the Board of Deputies was officially non-Zionist.”