Rachel Deblinger is a historian of the Holocaust and American Jewish life. She has built a career facilitating access to knowledge and engagement with historical memory through digital archives, ethical collection building, and open access initiatives.
Deblinger is the Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at the UCLA Library, a granting program that funds the documentation and digitization of at-risk cultural heritage materials from around the world. MEAP ensures that global knowledge is preserved and openly accessible through the UCLA Digital Library platform as a challenge to politicized and nationalized historical narratives that minimize or silence multiple voices and perspectives.
In its first six years, the Modern Endangered Archives Program has funded 138 projects to preserve archives in 58 different countries. During the same period, MEAP received applications from communities in over 100 countries. To date, MEAP has published nearly 100,000 unique archival materials, including film, video, audio, photographs, newspapers, ephemera, and other archival objects. Through this work, Deblinger collaborates with international institutions of all sizes, from grassroots, volunteer-based labor unions to research universities and national archives, to ensure that funds are disbursed around the globe, copyright and permissions are secured for online publication, and archival collections reflect community experiences and local knowledge.
Prior to her work with MEAP, Deblinger was the Founding Director of the UC Santa Cruz Digital Scholarship Commons and a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. At UCSC, Deblinger created opportunities for student engagement with digital primary sources, amplified support for digital pedagogy across campus, and built spaces in the library for innovative research, including the VIZLab for working with Virtual Reality.
Deblinger completed her doctorate in History at UCLA in 2014 and is the author of Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews learned about the Holocaust (2025, Indiana University Press). Her research focuses on early postwar Holocaust narratives, media technology, and the efforts of American Jewish communal organizations to aid survivors in Europe. Deblinger also writes and speaks about Holocaust memory, digital archives, and post-custodial collecting.
Deblinger lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.