In his 1984 book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, drawing on critical theory, in particular ideology critique, Herf coined the term "reactionary modernism" to describe the mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past, a highly technological romanticism, which was a current in the thinking of ideologues of Weimar's "conservative revolution" and of currents in the Nazi Party and Nazi regime.
His subsequent books examine the political culture of West Germany before and during the battle over Euromissiles in the 1980s; memory and politics regarding the Holocaust in East and West Germany; Nazi Germany's domestic antisemitic propaganda; and Nazi propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East; and the history of antagonism to Israel by the East German regime and West German leftist organizations from the Six Day War in 1967 to the Revolutions of 1989, and the collapse of the European Communist states and the German reunification in 1990; international support for and opposition to establishing the state of Israel, 1945-1949; and an essay collection in 2023, Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist.
Herf has had a variety of fellowships including at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the German Historical Institute in Washington, the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies in Tel Aviv, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and at the American Academy in Berlin in Fall 2007.
[1] Edited books Anthony McElligott and Jeffrey Herf, eds., Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Translations Essays and reviews on contemporary history, ideas and politics in American Interest, American Purpose, Commentary, Fathom Journal, Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung, History News Network, New German Critique, The New Republic, Partisan Review, Quillette, The Tablet Magazine, Telos,Times of Israel, Washington Post, Die Welt, and Die Zeit.