Professor Coenen Snyder teaches undergraduate surveys of modern Jewish history and European civilization, as well as a specialized undergraduate course on the Holocaust. She also offers graduate seminars in modern European history and in dissertation prospectus writing.

Professor Coenen Snyder is actively involved in setting up a new, interdisciplinary Jewish Studies Program at USC, one that will introduce undergraduate students to Jewish history, literature, religion, politics, and culture. Her own interests lie particularly in the relationship between the built environment and Jewish identity formation in nineteenth century Europe. Her first book, a comparative study of synagogue building and synagogue architecture in Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, explores how Jewish religious edifices became central to the public face of Judaism. Coenen Snyder's work thus aims to cross the conceptual boundaries of history, architecture, and urban studies. Her work on Amsterdam will be published in City Limits: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Historical European City (McGill-Queen University Press, forthcoming) as well as in the journal Jewish History (published at the University of Haifa, forthcoming).

She is currently broadening her comparative work in European Jewish history with a study of synagogue building in Paris. Many Jewish communities in north European capitals, including Paris, initiated spectacular building projects in the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, synagogues took on a new central role in mediating Jewishness in a modern society. Largely confined to the private domain in the early modern period, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards synagogues boldly announced the cultural sophistication, bourgeois affluence, and religious respectability of the Jewish population. Yet the communities in Holland, Great Britain, Germany , and France attached very different meanings and objectives to these religious structures due to the distinctive local and national context in which they were built. By looking closely at the debates over style, location, size, spatial lay-out, religious reform, and etiquette – all of which were closely related to Jewish self-representation and acculturation in predominantly Christian societies – Coenen Snyder offers a nuanced view of how Jews saw themselves and how they wanted to be seen by their contemporaries.

Saskia Coenen Snyder