Jacob Forbes

Jacob Forbes is a fourth-year PhD student and historian who studies elderly Holocaust survivors, postwar Jewish migration, and the history of elderly care in the postwar period. For the 2026/2027 academic year he is completing a doctoral fellowship with the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. He is advised by Professor Helmut Walser Smith.

His dissertation project, The Oldest Among Them: The Postwar Plight of Elderly Holocaust Survivors, historicizes the trajectories of elderly survivors’ lives from the end of the Second World War through the early 1960s; it investigates how these lives were both shaped by and helped shape the broader developments in health care and social work in East and West Germany, the United States, and Israel. This project has received generous support from the Leo Baeck Institute – New York, the JDC Archives, Freie Universität Berlin, and both the Max Kade Center and the Department of History at Vanderbilt University.

Before coming to Vanderbilt Jacob worked as a percussionist for over a decade, where he first developed a strong passion for teaching. He has since brought that passion into his years of work as a writing tutor and as an advocate for undergraduate writing instruction. As a freelance copyeditor, Jacob has contributed to multiple book projects published by Cambridge University Press.