Biography
Martin H. Schwartz is a PhD candidate in German Studies, earning a certificate in Cinema and Media Studies. Since receiving his MA from University of Chicago, he has served in roles including Program Curator at Goethe-Institut Seattle Pop Up and film programmer at Seattle International Film Festival. Martin is a published playwright and an alumnus of the Anti-Defamation League's Glass Leadership Institute. He is currently a Dissertation Fellow of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and a 2025 recipient of the Dissertation Research Grant from the American Academy of Jewish Research.
His dissertation, Remediating the Rich Jew: Antisemitism in West German Theatre and Film, examines continuity and change in the form and content of cultural antisemitism in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. Specifically, it addresses the figure of the Rich Jew (der reiche Jude) as presented in a cross-genre network of interrelated texts drawn from film, stage direction, written drama, and the novel. In complementary fashion, it explores these works’ contemporaneous reception—especially the infamous “Fassbinder Controversy”—in German and Jewish public spheres. Informed by antisemitism theory, history of ideas, media studies, and original archival research, this work considers the means by which and ends to which German post-Holocaust cultural production abstracted Judaism to money, and whether and to what extent the concomitant antisemitism is of a kind with previous forms of Judeophobia.