JONATHAN STEINBERG

STEINBERG--Dr. Jonathan, The Walter Annenberg Professor of Modern European History, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, died in Cambridge, England on March 4, 2021, four days before his 87th birthday. Born in New York City, the son of the late Rabbi Milton Steinberg of the Park Avenue Synagogue and the late Edith Alpert Steinberg, he was a dazzling lecturer, tutor, and prolific author. He taught at Trinity Hall at Cambridge University for more than three decades, before returning to America to teach at Penn. He was the author of many scholarly books, including Yesterday's Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet; All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941-1943; The Deutsche Bank and its Gold Transactions during the Second World War (principal author); and his magisterial biography of Otto von Bismarck, A Life, reviewed by Henry Kissinger in the New York Times as the best book on Bismarck in English. He also wrote for a larger audience, for example, Why Switzerland? and for the Teaching Company, a fascinating and diverse series of thirty-six biographies from all walks of life, each a thirty- minute cassette, entitled European History and European Lives: 1715 to 1914. Steinberg graduated Harvard magna cum laude and PBK, earning his doctorate from Cambridge University. He was actively engaged in every university, including Harvard, in which he was privileged to teach, tutoring students, writing prolifically for the popular press as well as erudite journals. He served as Chair of the History Department at Penn and Vice-Master of Trinity Hall. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Marion Kant, two sons, Matthew and Peter, and five grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at Trinity Hall in Cambridge once the pandemic permits travel. A piece of him will reside in each of the thousands of students lucky enough to have had him in class.