Deborah Hertz occupies the Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies at the University of California at San Diego. She is the author of Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (1988) and is the editor of a volume of Rahel Varnhagen’s letters: Briefe an eine Freundin: Rahel Varnhagen an Rebecca Friedländer (1988). Her latest book, How Jews Became Germans, is due to appear in 2007. Hertz is currently at work on a book entitled The Magic Circle of Race in Germany and Israel, a collective biography of German Zionists which compares Jewish and German nationalism in the twentieth century. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New German Critique, the American Historical Review, the Journal of Modern History and Tikkun Magazine.