Michael Berkowitz, a native of Rochester, New York, is Professor of modern Jewish history at University College London and editor of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England (UCL Press). He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and taught previously at the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, and the University of Judaism (then West Coast branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America).

Most recently author of Jews and Photography in Britain (University of Texas Press, 2015), his research in the last decade has been supported by Yad Vashem (Jerusalem), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), the Ransom Center (Austin, TX), the University of London, and the British Society for the History of Science. His previous monographs include The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (University of California Press, 2007) and Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1993 and University of North Carolina Press, 1997). A volume co-edited with Martin Deppner, The Jewish engagement with photography, appeared last year. He has four other edited or co-edited books.

From January to May 2017 he was a Fellow of the Remarque Institute of New York University,having spent the fall terms as a William J. Lowenberg Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.