Mead Fellow Quin McGlame ’25 recently spoke with Professor Samuel Kassow ‘66, who just served his final year as the Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College. Soon after graduating, Professor Kassow joined the Trinity faculty in 1972 with a concentration on Russian history.
Born in a Displaced Persons camp in 1946 Germany to Jewish parents, Prof. Kassow moved to the United States when he was 3 years old and settled in New Haven Connecticut. After graduating from Trinity College in 1966, Professor Kassow went to The London School of Economics as a Fulbright Scholar for his Masters and finally received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 on Russia studies and specifically Tsarist Russia history.
After returning to Trinity as a professor in 1972, Professor Kassow spent his first 20 years with a concentration on Russian history classes and even led a yearly trip to the USSR through the Russian studies program. However, after spending time in Israel in the 1990s as a visiting professor he began taking an interest in Holocaust research and soon shifted to studying Jewish society under Nazi occupation.
As he begins to shift away from his time at Trinity, Professor Kassow has no plans of slowing down anytime soon. For the 2024-2025 academic year he plans on teaching courses on the History of the Holocaust at both the University of Connecticut and Yale University. Additionally, he plans on continuing to lead travel trips to Europe, something he has done for numerous years with the YIVO, a Yiddish cultural organization. After next year, Professor Kassow will head down to Washington D.C. to serve as the Senior Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In this role, he will conduct public lectures on the atrocities committed during the Second World War and also work with graduate fellows from various countries. While Trinity will always have a special place in his heart, Professor Kassow is excited for the next chapter.
When asked about the importance of studying history in today’s world, Professor Kassow emphasized the importance of studying the past to better understand the present. He described that learning the history of a nation will help explain and contextualize its role in today’s society. Furthermore, he stressed the fact that a decent government system is fragile but still important and must be protected by any means. As for advice to both prospective and current historians at Trinity, Professor Kassow encourages students to challenge themselves each and every day and to approach history as a real opportunity to become better members of society
