Samuel D. Kassow (born October 3, 1946)^[1] is an American historian of the history ofAshkenazi Jewry.

Kassow was born in adisplaced persons' camp inStuttgart, Germany. His mother survived because she, along with her sister, was hidden in a dug-out underneath a barn on a classmate's family's farm; his father was arrested by the Soviets and spent the duration of the war in a Soviet prison camp.^[2][3] Kassow grew up inNew Haven, Connecticut.^[4]

Kassow graduated from theWatkinson School in Hartford, Connecticut in 1962.^[5] In 1966, he earned his B.A. fromTrinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. In 1968, Kassow earned a M.Sc. from theLondon School of Economics. In 1976, he earned a Ph.D. fromPrinceton University.

Kassow was the Charles Northam Professor at Trinity College for many years, until his retirement in 2025.^[6]

Kassow was a consultant to theMuseum of History of the Polish Jews, which opened on the site of theWarsaw Ghetto, and was responsible for two of the eight core exhibitions.^[7]

In his book,Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive From the Warsaw Ghetto, Kassow speaks about the importance of preserving historical documents and the past. He describes the historical events going on during World War II in the 1940s that affected and eventually eliminated the Warsaw Ghetto. His main focus is theRingelblum Archive created in absolute secrecy by a small group of people that lived in the Warsaw Ghetto which were uncovered and studied about ten years later.^[8]

In 2014,Indiana University Press and the United States Holocaust Museum publishedThe Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police, with an introduction by Kassow.

His 2007 bookWho Will Write Our History was adapted intoa documentary film of the same title, directed byRoberta Grossman and produced byNancy Spielberg. It was released in 2018.

• Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia: 1884-1917, University of California Press, 1989.ISBN 0-520-05760-0.
• Between Tsar and People: the Search for a Public Identity in Tsarist Russia. Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, James L. West eds. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1991.ISBN 0-691-03153-3.
• The Distinctive Life of East European Jewry, YIVO, New York 2004
• Who will Write our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Indiana University Press, 2007
• The Holocaust inThe Cambridge History of Judaism Vol VIII pages 633-671, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Kassow is married to Lisa Pleskow Kassow. She is a director of Zach's Hillel at Trinity College.^[9]

• Samuel Kassow atIMDb
• Samuel Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? - Review by Clara Weiss

• Historians of Ashkenazi Jewry
• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• Trinity College (Connecticut) alumni
• Princeton University alumni
• Alumni of the London School of Economics
• Trinity College (Connecticut) faculty
• 1946 births
• Living people
• Writers from New Haven, Connecticut
• American people of Polish-Jewish descent
• Jewish American historians
• Historians from Connecticut
• American male non-fiction writers
• 21st-century American Jews
• American Ashkenazi Jews

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