Jewish History Matters

**84: The First Aliyah and Historical Memory of Jewish Settlement in Israel/Palestine with Liora R. Halperin** Apr 19, 2022
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Liora Halperin joins us to discuss her book The Oldest Guard: Forting the Zionist Settler Past, and the broader issues it raises about the history of Zionist settlement in Israel and Palestine, historical memory, and why it all matters. Listen in as we dive into the history and memory of the early Zionist movement, and the ways in which it has shaped the discourse and debates over more than a century.

You can read an excerpt of The Oldest Guard here.

Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, at the University of Wshington in Seattle. THE OLDEST GUARD is her latest book, published in 2021; and she is also the author of BABEL IN ZION: JEWS, NATIONALISM, AND LANGUAGE DIVERSITY IN PALESTINE, 1920–1948.

83: Ethical Technology and the Holocaust with Deb Donig Apr 04, 2022

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In this episode, Deb Donig joins us for a conversation about the intersection between contemporary technology and culture and the lessons of history. Listen in as we dive into ethical technology, the Holocaust, and what it means to learn from the past as we think about the present and future.

Deb Donig is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Cal Poly. She is the co-founder of the Cal Poly Ethical Technology Initiative, the incoming Director of the Center for Expressive Technologies, and the host of “Technically Human,” a podcast where she talks with major thinkers, writers, and industry-leading technologists about the relationship between humans and the technologies that we create. She has taught and published on a wide variety of areas including human rights, Holocaust memory, science fiction, ethical technology, and more.

Thanks so much for listening to our conversation, which we hope will spark more discussions about why studying the past matters as we look at the world around us.

82: The War in Ukraine and its Historical and Cultural Context with Amelia Glaser and Jeffrey Veidlinger Mar 09, 2022

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This episode, Jeffrey Veidlinger and Amelia Glaser join us to talk about the ongoing war in Ukraine and its historical and cultural context. We recorded on Tuesday, March 8th, 2022, and we are working to get this episode published as quickly as possible because so much can change so quickly. Listen in as we think about the background to the war, how we can understand Jewish history in Ukraine, and particularly Putin’s deranged claim to “denazify” Ukraine.

Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego, where she also holds an endowed chair in Judaic Studies. She is the author of “Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands” (Northwestern UP, 2012), and most recently “Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine” (Harvard UP, 2020). Currently, she is the Rita E. Hauser fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she is at work on a book about contemporary Ukrainian poetry and community, and she is also curating a series of translations of recent poetry from Ukraine for LitHub.

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, published in 2021,

**81: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Contemporary Holocaust Debates with Victoria Aarons, Jenny Caplan, and Jodi Eichler-Levine** Feb 27, 2022
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This episode, we are hosting a roundtable discussion with Victoria Aarons, Jenny Caplan, and Jodi Eichler-Levine about Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, and the recent controversy from January 2022 when a school board in Tennessee banned its teaching. This is a timely topic that ties together the history of Holocaust memory, Holocaust literature (including children’s Holocaust literature), education, and broad social and cultural issues of the present. Listen in as we dive into why Maus is such an important, even landmark work in Holocaust literature, what happened with this attempt to ban Maus, and what it tells us about ongoing debates about what is taught in schools and universities.

Topics, books, and relevant articles discussed today include:

Maus and Maus II, by Art Spiegalman
Jenny Caplan, “You Can’t Just Swap Out ‘Maus’ For Another Holocaust Book. It’s Special.” (JTA, Jan. 31, 2022)
Minutes of the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board meeting where Maus was banned (Jan. 10, 2022)

Our three guests bring together a wide range of research and thinking on the Holocaust, Holocaust literature and education, and also the intersection of Holocaust memory and popular culture:

Victoria Aarons is the O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She is the author or editor of numerous books, most recently Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, which was published in 2020 by Rutgers University Press.

Jenny Caplan is an assistant professor of religious studies at Towson University, where she’s also the program director for Jewish studies. She teaches courses in Jewish comics and graphic novels, and has several recent and forthcoming publications on Jewish identity, gender, meaning making, and comics. Her forthcoming book on American Jewish humor will be published with Wayne State University Press.

Jodi Eichler-Levine is the Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization and Professor of Religion Studies at Lehigh University. She is the author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community, which was published in 2020 the University of North Carolina Press . She is currently writing a book about the intersections between religion and the Walt Disney Company.

**80: Jewish American Writing and World Literature with Saul Noam Zaritt** Feb 15, 2022
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Saul Noam Zaritt speaks about Jewish American literature, its place in world literature, and what this tells us about how we understand modern Jewish history and culture at large. It’s the focus of his recent book, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody, where he explores a number of Jewish writers who were working in Yiddish or in translation, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Saul Bellow, and others, and what their work tells us about the transformation of modern Jewish culture. In addition, we’ll talk about what this all means when we think about modern Jewish studies and how we understand it in its broader cultural context.

Purchase Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody

Saul Noam Zaritt is an Associate Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard University. He studies the politics of translation in modern Jewish culture and he is a founding editor of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. His book, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody, which is the center of our conversation today, was published in 2020. He is currently at work on a second book, entitled “A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture.”

**79: Palestine and the Power of the Archive with Gil Z. Hochberg** Feb 02, 2022
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In this episode, our guest is Gil Z. Hochberg, who will be speaking about how we can develop a sophisticated approach to thinking about Palestine and Israel through the concept of “the Archive.”

Gil Z. Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University where she is also chair of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is the author of numerous books, the most recent of which is Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, which was published by Duke University Press in 2021.

Purchase Becoming Palestine: Toward and Archival Imagination of the Future
Read the introduction to Becoming Palestine

In this episode, Gil and I will think through the importance of archives – both historical archives themselves, and the archive as an idea – in the context of Israel and Palestine. As Gil points out in her book, the question of archives raises crucial issues about Israel and Palestine, developments in Palestinian culture, and the ongoing conflict at large. As she suggests, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been dominated by the archive of the past: historians from the 1980s onwards have unearthed archival evidence of the Naqba, the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, which has shaped the ongoing debates on the politics of the region. But is there a limit to the political power of this archival knowledge? As we’ve seen, even though we know about the Naqba we are not exactly closer to any kind of justice, or political resolution of the conflict. So as Gil suggests, we might speak about the limits of the archive of history and start to think about what it means to create an archive of the future.

This is obviously an issue that is of deep interest to me on an intellectual level, on a historical level, and also in terms of thinking through the politics of the conflict and Israeli and Palestinian culture, which is truthfully one of the reasons I reached out to Gil to be on the podcast. But I also think there is something deep to consider here: In what ways can the idea of the archive contribute our thinking about Palestine and Israel? What does it mean to talk about archives of the future? And in this light, how and why does history matter?

**78: Jewish Primitivism with Samuel Spinner** Jan 18, 2022
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In this episode, we’re joined by Sam Spinner to talk about Jewish primitivism. Listen in as we take a deep dive into primitivism in European culture, Jewish primitivism and its politics, and what it all means when we think about twentieth century Jewish life.

Read an excerpt from Jewish Primitivism from Stanford University Press
Purchase Jewish Primitivism (Amazon)

Samuel Spinner is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Johns Hopkins University. His book Jewish Primitivism, which is the starting point for our conversation today, was published in 2021 by Stanford University Press. Spinner is a co-editor of “German Jewish Cultures,” a book series published by Indiana University Press, and he also serves as an editor of the Yiddish Studies journal In Geveb.

Jewish Primitivism is a phenomenally exciting investigation of primitivism in modern Jewish literature, photography, and graphic art. Primitivism—the elevation and valorization of so-called “primitive” cultures—is an important movement in European art and culture broadly speaking, and Spinner’s book explores how primitivism manifested itself in modern Jewish culture. Thanks for listening.

**77: Rabbi Leo Baeck with Michael A. Meyer** Jan 02, 2022
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In this episode, we’re joined by Michael A. Meyer to talk about Rabbi Leo Baeck and his legacy, as a window into twentieth-century German Jewish history, both before the Holocaust and also in the shadow of that tremendous tragedy. Listen in as we discuss his new book, Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times, and think about the big picture lessons we can take away from Baeck’s life and his legacy.

Read an excerpt from Rabbi Leo Baeck
Purchase Rabbi Leo Baeck on Amazon

Michael A. Meyer is the Adolph S. Ochs Professor Emeritus of Jewish History at Hebrew Union College. He is a distinguished scholar in the fields of modern Jewish history, German Jewish history, and beyond. Among his books, notable ones include: The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824, which was published in 1967, and Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (1988). He also edited Ideas of Jewish History (1974), and the four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, which was published in four volumes from 1996 to 1998. More recently, he has written Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020, and is the focus of our conversation in this episode.

Rabbi Leo Baeck is a stirring biography of one of the most prominent rabbis of the last century. Born in 1873, Leo Baeck became a spiritual leader of German Jewry in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a rabbi in Silesia and later in Berlin, where he was the chief rabbi from 1912 to 1942, when he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There, Baeck played an important role in the attempt to develop Jewish cultural activities in the most adverse of circumstances. After the war, Baeck settled in London, where he continued to play a leading role in the rebuilding of German Jewish cultural life in its diaspora; he passed away in 1956, but his legacy lives on in many ways, among them the many synagogues that bear his name and also the Leo Baeck Institute, the research institute on German Jewry which was established in 1954 with branches in London, New York, Jerusalem, and today also in Berlin.

Rabbi Leo Baeck is a biography that tells us the life story of one man, Leo Baeck; and like much of Michael Meyer’s excellent scholarship it offers cogent and coherent insight into his religious ideas within the context of the broader intellectual history that shaped his lifetime. But the book also does something bigger, by offering us a very personal window into the world of German Jewry in the early twentieth century, in the Nazi era, and also the story of its postwar legacy.

**76: Iraqi Jewry and Its Global Diaspora with Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah** Nov 28, 2021
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In this episode, we’re joined by Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah to talk about Iraqi Jewry and its global diaspora. Listen in as we dive into the development of Iraqi or Baghdadi Jewry and its many satellite communities in the twentieth century—in India, China, Singapore, and elsewhere—and how we thereby can understand the global nature of Jewish communal, commercial, and other kinds of networks, and also the meaning of diaspora and dispersion more generally.

Sasha Goldstein-Sabbah is an assistant professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Groningen. She is the author of Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism, which was published by Brill in 2021, and is the starting point for our conversation in this episode.

**75: The Jews’ Indian and Global Settler Colonialism with David S. Koffman** Nov 14, 2021
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David S. Koffman joins the podcast to talk about Jews and native peoples in North America. It’s the topic of his recent book, The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America, which serves as the jumping off point for our wide-ranging conversation. In this episode, we dive into how American Jews imagined Indians in the 19th and 20th centuries — similar to the broader process of how other white settlers created their own imagined version of native peoples — and what this means this means we try to make sense of American Jewish history, and modern Jewish history as a whole, within the wider context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics and cultures.

David S. Koffman is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at York University, where he holds the J. Richard Schiff chair for the study of Canadian Jewry. He is also the editor in chief of Canadian Jewish Studies.

In today’s episode, we think critically about the place of American Jews within the process of white settlement in the American context as well as beyond. As David explains in his book The Jews’ Indian, which was published in 2019, American Jews, and other white peoples, had complex and changing relations with the natives who they encountered. This is clearly an important issue in general terms, as we can look at the white imagination of the Indian in all sorts of cultural contexts — whether we talk about cowboy and Indian radio and TV programs, or wild west novels and stories like those of Karl May in German culture and beyond.

However, within the context of Jewish history, these issues raise very unsettling questions: How is it that American Jews saw themselves? In what ways did American Jews seek to differentiate themselves from Native Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they similarly tried to distinguish themselves from African Americans, in an effort to cultivate themselves as “white”? How did this change in the second half of the twentieth century, as Jews became involved in the struggle for native rights? And what does this all mean in terms of Jews’ broader part in the process of settler colonialism in the United States and also around the world? David’s book offers a tremendously novel take on modern Jewish history, both in American and also beyond it: he suggests that we look at Jewish life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lens of colonialism and settler colonialism in particular.

**74: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and its Afterlife with Avinoam Patt** Oct 31, 2021
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Avinoam Patt joins us to talk about the Warsaw ghetto uprising and its afterlife: How it was understood during the time of the Second World War itself, and how it’s been remembered in the decades since. In our conversation today, the book offers a platform to think deeply about how the Ghetto uprising has been mythologized, the role of Warsaw in modern Jewish memory, and the history and memory of the Holocaust at large.

Purchase The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of a Revolt on Amazon

Avinoam Patt is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Connecticut, where he is also the Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. Avi’s research focuses on the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and his first book was Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust, which was published in 2009. He has also edited a number of volumes, and his most recent book which we’ll be talking about today is The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, which was published in 2021 by Wayne State University Press.

The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw, which is the starting point for our conversation today, explores how the Jews who fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising have been understood and why it matters. People outside of Europe knew about the uprising soon after it too place — but given the war’s chaos, it was unclear who exactly had led the it. So in the months and years that followed, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was instrumentalized, or put to use, by Jewish socialists, Zionists, and others who wanted to take credit for the uprising and thereby lend legitimacy to their own ideologically-driven understanding of the ghetto uprising and the Holocaust at large.

**73: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union with Eliyana Adler** Oct 10, 2021
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Eliyana Adler joins us to talk about Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Union in 1939, and who subsequently survived the Second World War and the Holocaust in Siberia and Central Asia. Listen in as we discuss her book Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, and the big picture issues it raises about how we understand the Holocaust, what it means to be a survivor, and the paradoxes of history: those Jews who were deported by the Soviet Union found themselves far away from the Nazi genocide.

Survival on the Margins is a phenomenal book, which tells us about those Polish Jews who fled to the east when war broke out in September 1939; after the Molotov-RIppentrop treaty re-partitioned Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany, in the chaos of war about 200,000 Jews escaped from the Nazis into the Soviet Union—where they were subsequently deported further east, in many cases to Siberia and other locations in central Asia. After the war, they were allowed to return to Poland, where they discovered the full extent of the Holocaust’s destruction. In the war’s aftermath, they actually made up a large portion of the total group of Holocaust survivors—but in the years since, for various reasons their story has been subsumed into the main Holocaust narratives.

Eliyana Adler is an Associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is an historian of the modern Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, and her most recent book, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, is the basis for our conversation today.

**72: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging with Alma Heckman** Sep 19, 2021
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Alma Heckman joins us to talk about twentieth-century Moroccan Jews, and especially Moroccan Jewish communism and its broader politics, which is the focus of her recent book The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging.

Listen in as we dive into the history of Moroccan Jewish politics, the development of Zionism, communism, colonialism, and nationalism in Morocco and North Africa at large, and why it’s important to think through the choices and agency that Jews in Morocco and beyond have had in determining their fate and politics throughout the twentieth century.

Alma Rachel Heckman is an Assistant Professor of History and the Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz. She is the author of ‌The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2021.

**71: Streaming the Holocaust with Marat Grinberg** Sep 05, 2021
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Marat Grinberg joins us to speak about how the Holocaust is portrayed and represented in popular culture, particularly in contemporary television.

Listen in as we dive into how the Holocaust has played a role in the tv landscape, from “The Plot Against America” (the recent adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel) and “The Man in the High Castle” to “Hunters” and “Judah.”

How do we depict history in popular culture? How does television and other popular media play a role in shaping the historical viewpoints of everyday people? And what is the relationship between historical truth and plain fiction?

Marat Grinberg is a scholar of Jewish and Russian literature and culture, and of cinema, and an associate professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College. He is the author of “I am to Be Read not from Left to Right, but in Jewish: from Right to Left”: The Poetics of Boris Slutsky (2011), and Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (2016). His next book, forthcoming from Brandeis University Press in 2022, is titled “The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines.” He also has written a fantastic chapter on this topic, which is what brought us to record this episode, titled “Representing the Holocaust and Jewishness in Contemporary Television,” in the 2021 book The Holocaust Across Borders: Trauma, Atrocity, and Representation in Literature and Culture.

This whole issue of Holocaust representation, as we’ll get into today, is a huge topic: How do we tell the story of the Holocaust? To use the phrase from the early 1990s conference on the topic—what are the “limits of representation”? That is to say, what are the boundary lines for how we talk about the Holocaust? The development of contemporary TV that engages with the Holocaust and other related topics, in the genres of alternate history, science fiction, vampires, and so on all stretch the limits of how we can talk about historical events. And it has even led to some criticism that these depictions are so ahistorical that they lead to misinformation or otherwise disrespect the deeply personal histories and experiences related to the Holocaust.

Altogether, recent depictions in shows like “The Man in the High Castle,” an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name that tells an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II, or “Hunters,” a show about Nazi hunters in the 1970s, raise very important and challenging questions about the meaning and value of history. How does history inform these fictional accounts? How does fiction treat history respectfully? In what ways does history matter as we think about the contemporary cultural landscape? And how does the changing landscape of our media – streaming services and all that – affect the way that the Holocaust finds its way into the worldwide media that we consume?

**70: Dancing and Jewish Modernity with Sonia Gollance** May 23, 2021
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Sonia Gollance joins us to talk about her book It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, an exciting new book which deals with the history of dance and modern Jewish culture.

Sonia Gollance is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate in Yiddish Literature and Culture Studies at the University of Vienna. In September, she will join the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London as Lecturer in Yiddish. Gollance is also the Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama, an initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.

Purchase It Could Lead to Dancing on Amazon
Read an excerpt from It Could Lead to Dancing

It Could Lead to Dancing really is such an exciting approach to thinking about modern Jewish culture. Listen in as we discuss how social dancing was both an important part of Jewish cultural history and also as a great way to think about all sorts of important themes in modern Jewish history, both in Europe and the United States—whether we are talking about mobility, both on the dance floor and social mobility on a larger scale, or thinking about gender, or the practical social spaces where Jews negotiated their participation in wider society.

**69: American Judaism Beyond the Synagogue with Rachel B. Gross** May 09, 2021
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For this episode, we’re joined today by Rachel B. Gross to talk about nostalgia and lived religion in American Jewish life, which is the focus of her book Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice.

Rachel B. Gross is Assistant Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University.

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Read an excerpt from the book

Listen in as we talk about a variety of ways in which American Jews connect to their past through nostalgia—through historical museums like the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side, through genealogy, through children’s books and dolls, and through delis and other foodways. As Rachel explains, nostalgia actually offers a kind of lived religious practice, even if it is beyond the synagogue.

The 2013 Pew Research Center’s Portrait of Jewish Americans divided Jews into “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion.” Beyond the Synagogue asks us to rethink what is religion in American Jewish life and how it is that Jews access and interact with Judaism in a myriad of ways.

67: Is a Two State Solution Possible in Israel/Palestine? Considering the Paradigms of the Conflict with Ian Lustick Apr 11, 2021

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In our latest episode, Ian Lustick joins us to talk about the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Listen in as we dive into how we might think about the paradigm of a two-state solution in historical perspective, and the ways in which history matters when we look at issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and beyond.

Ian Lustick is the author of an important book, Paradigm Lost: From Two State Solution to One State Reality, which is the focus of our conversation today. He holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling.

Paradigm Lost is an important book, and a profoundly challenging one. It presents an argument that not everyone will agree with. The idea that a two state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is no longer possible is not really a new one: it’s been a quarter-century since the Oslo agreements, and pessimism seems to reign.

But Lustick offers two powerful but potentially controversial ideas about the failure of the two state solution.

First, he insists that it is not just about the inability to implement a good idea since the ‘90s. Instead, he places the blame directly on Israel’s settlement project and its “territorial maximalism,” which has its roots in the history of the entire twentieth-century conflict. He points to Zev Jabotinsky’s notion of the “Iron Wall,” the idea that Arabs would only negotiate with Jews after they had been defeated – which had the paradoxical outcome that repeated Israeli victories emboldened the Israeli leadership so they were less likely to come to the negotiating table. He also emphasizes the collective memory of the Holocaust as a profound factor in Israeli society, and the pro-Israel lobby in the United states, both of which embolden Israel’s hawkish parties and make the Israelis less likely to come to negotiate a two state solution.

Secondly, Lustick — who once was a proponent of the two state solution, now says that it is a distraction from reality. He argues that there is, and has long been, just one state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. The pursuit a of a two state solution, he posits, is an unrealizable dream when the real need is to push for equal rights and citizenship for all people living in this territory which is effectively one state.

It is, as he puts it, a paradigm shift: borrowing the language of the history of science and Thomas Kuhn in particular, he talks about the fundamental structures of how we look at the world. If we replace the paradigm of a two-state solution with a new paradigm, a one-state reality, it totally changes the way that we look at the conflict, the questions we ask, and the kinds of resolutions we might strive towards.

Again, not everyone will agree with Ian’s analysis, but we hope the book, and our conversation today on the podcast, will help generate conversations about Israel, the Palestinians, and the way we look at the future of the region.

**66: The Hitler Haggadah with Jonnie Schnytzer** Mar 24, 2021
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How could someone title a Passover Haggadah the “Hitler Haggadah”? Listen in as we explore an incredible source, a 1943 Judeo-Arabic Passover Haggadah from Morocco which retells a story of freedom—not of the Exodus from Egypt, but of the Holocaust and the Allied invasion of North Africa in the 1940s.

In this episode, Jonnie Schnyzter, who edited this new translation, joins us to talk about the Hitler Haggadah, what it tells us about the Holocaust, about Middle Eastern and North African Jewish history, and about the meaning of Passover and the Seder as malleable holidays and rituals which contribute to the construction of historical memory.

Purchase The Hitler Haggadah from Print-o-Craft

Jonnie Schnytzer is a Phd candidate at Bar Ilan University, with a focus on medieval kabbalah. His dissertation is focused on the thought of the 14th-century kabbalist Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi, and Jonnie is also preparing a critical edition of Ashkenazi’s commentary on Sefer Yetsira. Jonnie also edited an English edition of ‘The Hitler Haggadah’, which we’re talking about today.

**65: Waste Siege: Infrastructure and the Environment in Israel/Palestine with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins** Mar 14, 2021
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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins talks about how we can look at Israel/Palestine and global issues in new ways, through the fascinating lens of waste—the byproducts of human society and what we do with them.

People often look at Israel/Palestine, and the Middle East, in terms of scarce resources such as water and oil. Sophia’s book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, looks not at resources but byproducts. This turns our perspective on its head in exciting and incredibly challenging ways. As she puts it, the experience of Palestinians being besieged by waste both describes the state of statelessness in Palestine, and specifically the challenge of infrastructure in that situation. But on a larger scale, it also serves as a metaphor for a dying planet.

Read an excerpt from the introduction to Waste Siege

Waste Siege offers an exciting, innovative approach to thinking about Israel/Palestine, and the lived experience of Palestinians in particular, through the lens of waste: as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of the Israelis, what happens when waste is transformed from “matter out of place” into matter with no place to go? It’s a powerful approach because it articulates matter-of-fact aspects of what life is like in the Palestinian territories, but it also offers a powerful conceptual framework: It calls on us to think about the byproducts of Zionism and its history in both practical and metaphorical terms. What are the outcomes of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the formation of the state of Israel that many people would prefer to push off to the side? What is more, this “waste siege” on the Palestinians calls on us to think about the nature of our planet as a whole. Considering the climate crisis careening towards us, how can the experience of the Palestinians speak to the broader phenomenon of the global south and its encounter with the waste of the industrialized world?

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Waste Siege was awarded the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association.

**64: A Hebrew Infusion: Hebrew at American Jewish Summer Camps with Sharon Avni, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Jonathan Krasner** Feb 28, 2021
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Sharon Avni, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Jonathan Krasner join us to talk about talk about their recent book Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, and the big issues it raises about the role of Hebrew in American Jewish culture and history.

Hebrew Infusion combines sociological, historical, and linguistic approaches to thinking about what our guests term Camp Hebraized English. But while it may seem to be focused on a very specific cultural and linguistic development at a very specific time and place—at camps in the summer—it speaks to broad issues about the changes that have taken place in American Jewish culture, and what it means for there to be an infusion of Hebrew and other aspects of Jewish culture in camp and also different spheres of Jewish life. Thanks for listening in for this fascinating conversation about how language functions in Jewish culture.

Sharon Avni is Associate Professor of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at CUNY, the City University of New York. Her research has examined how ideologies of language, heritage, diaspora and peoplehood are constructed and negotiated through educational practices and policies in formal and experiential educational sites for Jewish American urban youth.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. In addition to Hebrew Infusion, which we’re talking about today, she is also the author of Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism, which was awarded the 2013 Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish Literature.

Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Associate Professor on Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education, which was awarded the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.

**63: The Scholems: Considering German Jewry’s History and Legacy with Jay Geller** Feb 14, 2021
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Jay Geller reflects on the history and legacy of German Jewry as a whole through the lens of the history of a single bourgeois family, the Scholems, which is the topic of his recent book The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction.

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The book offers a fascinating look at the history of an entire society through the lens of one family. We can see how each of the four Scholem brothers grew up in the same middle-class German Jewish culture but charted their own political and historical path through the contours of German Jewish history and its diaspora. Gerhard or Gershom Scholem, the Zionist, immigrated to Palestine in 1924 and is most widely known for his scholarship on Jewish mysticism; his brother Werner, who became a leading figure in the German Communist party in the 1920s, was murdered by the Nazis at Buchenwald, and Reinhold and Erich, respectively a nationalist and liberal, made their way to Australia in the 1930s.

The Scholem family is simultaneously an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family, and it is at the same time also distinctly everyday, showcasing through this microcosm the whole story of Jews in Germany as a whole in the lead-up to the second world war and the Holocaust. We’re so excited to discuss share this conversation about the the Scholems and German Jewish history in the largest terms. Listen in as we think through both the history of Jews in Germany, as well as the legacy of German Jewish culture.

Jay Geller is the Samuel Rosenthal Professor of Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University’s Department of History. In addition to The Scholems, his most recent book, he has also written ‌Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953.

**62: The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex with Lila Corwin Berman** Jan 31, 2021
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Lila Corwin Berman speaks about her new book The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multi-Billion Dollar Institution, and about the history of philanthropy in the American Jewish life and what it tells us about American Jewry, America, and capitalism and its culture. As Lila articulates, philanthropy is something which touches all aspects of our lives and we should think critically about how it operates, and what that means in historical and cultural terms.

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Read an excerpt from the book

Lila Corwin Berman is Professor of History at Temple University, where she holds the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History and directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She is the author of numerous books, including The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex, which we’re talking about today, as well as ‌Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit, which appeared in 2015, and ‌Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (which she published in 2009).

**61: The Blood Libel Accusation with Magda Teter** Jan 17, 2021
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Magda Teter joins us to discuss the history of the blood libel accusation and its continued relevance. Listen in for a wide-ranging conversation about the history of the blood libel, its origin and how it has transformed over the century, and what it tells us about misinformation and how it spreads.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of numerous books, most recently Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), which we’ll talk about today.

You can also check out the accompanying website, www.thebloodlibeltrail.org, where you can explore the book as well as fascinating maps and other related media about the antisemitic myth.

The blood libel is one of the long-standing false accusations against the Jews, the myth—in different variations—that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood for various rituals. It’s obviously, patently false, and yet it has persisted across nearly a thousand years. From medieval England to modern Nazi antisemitism and beyond, we see the imagery of the blood libel persists – even in new forms like the conspiracy theories of QAnon.

As Magda Teter argues, these accusations became a vehicle for different anxieties about Jews, and about the world at large. And further, it was the printing press which enabled the proliferation and persistence of these false myths and disinformation, which when published allowed them both to spread more widely and also gave them an air of “respectability” because they existed in print. This allows us to think deeply about the role of media technologies—both in medieval and early modern Europe, and also more recently with the internet—as avenues not for the spread of information, but misinformation.

**60: The Cairo Genizah with Marina Rustow** Jan 03, 2021
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Marina Rustow joins us to talk about her book The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, and about the Cairo Genizah and why it matters. Listen in for an expansive conversation about how we can consider the Genizah in new ways, what it tells us about the Fatimid state in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and how this teaches us about how documents and records function in social as well as historical terms.

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University, where she also runs the Princeton Genizah Lab.

58: Rabbinic Drinking with Jordan Rosenblum Dec 06, 2020

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Jordan Rosenblum joins us to talk about his book Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature—how drinks and drinking provide an avenue for understanding the Talmud in its context, and illuminates big issues about the nature of rabbinic literature, the world of late antiquity, and also about how issues of food and drink in Judaism, stemming from the Talmud, reverberate through the centuries.

Purchase Rabbinic Drinking: What Beverages Teach Us About Rabbinic Literature from the University of California press, and you can use the code 17M6662 to take 30% off.

Jordan Rosenblum is the Belzer Professor of Classical Judaism, and the Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he’s also the Chair of the Department of Art History there. His research focuses on the literature, law, and social history of the rabbinic movement in general and, in particular, on rabbinic food regulations. Rabbinic Drinking is his latest book, and he’s also published titles including: Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism and The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World.

Rabbinic Drinking is a great book because it’s both a useful introduction to the Talmud and rabbinic literature more broadly, and it also uses drinks and drinking to open a range of issues that normally people don’t think about. And it’s not just about alcohol: in the Talmud, discussions of drinks and drinking of course begins with beer and wine, but also include water, mythical drinks, and the rabbis even discuss breastfeeding. As such, the issues of drinks and drinking raise important and complex questions about how we understand the Talmud as a historical text within its own context, The complex gender dynamics—especially with regards to the male rabbis speaking about women’s bodies—is just one of these issues. Altogether, it uses drinks and drinking to provide an avenue to open up the Talmud, and its complex historical and textual meaning, and make an often-dense corpus accessible.

57: Jews and the History of Finance with Francesca Trivellato Nov 22, 2020

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Francesca Trivellato joins us to discuss her book The Promise and Peril of Credit, and the longstanding legend that Jews invented bills of exchange. Listen in to our wide-ranging conversation about the history of Jews and finance in early modern Europe and its ramifications for today. The Promise and Peril of Credit offers a fascinating account of the history of bills of exchange in early modern Europe, which were a mechanism for merchants to exchange goods, services, and money over long distances, and specifically the myth that Jews invented them.

And this might seem like a fascinating but niche topic, but it really isn’t: It provides a way to talk about economic history and what it teaches us in the biggest terms, about the relationship between the nuts and bolts of the economy and the myths that surround these often opaque processes, and about the staying power of such myths that resonate from the seventeenth century to the 2008 financial crisis.

And then, of course, there’s the question of what all this means when we throw the Jews into the equation: The fact that Jews were associated with financial instruments like bills of exchange is part of a much longer history about the place of Jews in European culture, antisemitism and anti-Judaism, and the role of myths in society.

Francesca Trivellato is a historian of early modern Italy and continental Europe, focusing of the organization and culture of the marketplace in the pre-industrial world. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and her books include The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, which appeared in 2009, and her 2019 book which we are discussing today, The Promise and Peril of Credit, which was awarded the 2020 Jacques Barzun Book Prize in Cultural History by the American Philosophical Society.

56: Tracing a Rainbow Thread of Queer Histories Throughout Jewish History with Noam Sienna Nov 08, 2020

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Noam Sienna joins us to discuss the history of gender and sexuality across the arc of Jewish history, which he highlighted in his book A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969. It’s a fantastic book, and a great jumping-off point for our conversation about why the history of gender and sexuality matters, and how we can see LGBTQ histories as a rainbow thread that runs across Jewish history as a whole. Listen in for our conversation about what it means to bring in new voices into the history of the Jews, and how Jewish history can be in conversation to the broader field of queer studies.

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Noam Sienna is a historian of Jewish culture in the medieval and early modern periods, focusing on the Sephardi world. He received his PhD in Jewish History and Museum Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2020, and currently teaches history and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St. Thomas. His first book, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969, was published in 2019, and it was awarded both the Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and the Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Association.

55: Masada—From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, with Jodi Magness Oct 25, 2020

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In this episode, Jodi Magness about the history of Masada, its role in public memory, and why it matters. Her book Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, which synthesizes the history of the site as well as how it has been received in modern times, offers a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation about what Masada means in terms of both scholarship and public memory.

Purchase Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth from Princeton University Press (and use code MAS-FG for a 30% discount)
Read an excerpt from the book

Jodi Magness holds a senior endowed chair in the Dept of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism, and she is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests focus on Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic periods, and Diaspora Judaism in the Roman world.

**54: The Future of Democracy in Global Context, with Dahlia Scheindlin, Joshua Shanes, and Jeremi Suri** Oct 11, 2020
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For this episode, tune in to an important and timely panel discussion about the future of democracy in a global context. We’ll be looking at the erosion of democratic norms and the attacks on democratic institutions within Israel and the US, placing it in global context, and thinking about why history matters when we consider important contemporary affairs.

Our hope is that this conversation, and the panel of three prominent scholars, can shed some light on these issues of critical importance. We hope you find this episode to be productive and fruitful as we think through some of the most important issues of our time through historical and global context. As you’ll find, there are perhaps more questions than we can consider in an hour, so we trust that this will just be a starting point for a continuing conversation about the history of democracy and its prognosis for the future in a global perspective.

Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion expert and strategic consultant specializes in conducting research and policy analysis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, regional foreign policy, democracy, and more. She has been an adjunct lecturer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Tel Aviv University, the Jezreel Valley College, and Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus. She is a co-founder and columnist at +972 Magazine, and is currently a fellow at The Century Foundation, a policy fellow at Mitvim – the Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies, and she co-hosts The Tel Aviv Review podcast.

Joshua Shanes is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston,and his research focuses on Central and East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically turn-of-the-century Galicia and the rise of Zionism as a counter-movement to the traditional Jewish establishment. And he’s published widely on modern Jewish politics, culture, and religion, as well as issues surrounding democracy and fascism, in academic and popular venues including the Washington Post, Slate, Haaretz and elsewhere.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas an Austin, and is a Professor in the Department of History there as well as the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs. Jeremi’s primary research interests include the formation and spread of nation-states, the emergence of modern international relations, the connections between foreign policy and domestic politics, and the rise of knowledge institutions as global actors. He is also the host of the podcast This is Democracy.

53: Small Objects, Big Lessons: The Art of the Jewish Family with Laura Arnold Leibman Sep 29, 2020

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Laura Arnold Leibman joins us to talk about early American Jewish history and material culture, and the big lessons that we learn from looking at a handful of small objects which she studies in her recent book The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects. Listen in for our conversation about how material objects and material culture illuminate our understanding of American Jewish history, and why it matters.

Purchase The Art of the Jewish Family (and use the code AJFJHM15 for a 15% discount)

The Art of the Jewish Family is an exciting book which uses micro history and material culture—looking at individual lives and histories, through material objects—to tell a big story about the lives of Jewish women in New York and the wider Atlantic world from 1750 to 1850. These objects include a letter written in 1761 to request financial aid from New York’s Congregation Shearith Israel; silver cups; ivory miniatures; commonplace books; and family portraits. Altogether they tell us an important set of stories about people who we don’t always pay attention to in history.

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. Her general field of interest is religion and American culture prior to the American Civil War. Her 2012 book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life was awarded a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award, and she recently published The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects, which we speak about in the podcast.

**52: Ghetto, Concentration Camp, Fascism: Why Words Matter with Daniel B. Schwartz** Sep 13, 2020
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Why do historical terms matter, like Ghetto, concentration camp, and fascism? Daniel B. Schwartz joins us to discuss his book Ghetto: The History of a Word, and about why historical terms and words matter—why it’s important to understand their origins and how they’ve changed, and also how they can be applied to understanding our own world.

Thanks to Harvard University Press, we have a few copies of the book to offer to listeners! Enter our raffle for a free copy of Ghetto: The History of a Word.

Daniel B. Schwartz is Professor of History at George Washington University, and he’s the chair of the Department of History there. In addition to his recent book Ghetto, he is also the author of The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image, which was cowinner of the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize for the best first book in Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History.

Ghetto: The History of a Word is an important, fascinating book that traces the history of the term “Ghetto” from sixteenth-century Italy to the twenty-first century. It considers the origins of the term, and how it has been put to use within both Jewish and non-Jewish contexts since then.

The term “ghetto” has become quite a multifaceted term, put to use as a metaphor to understand Jewish modernity in contrast with medieval Jewish life, in the context of the Holocaust, as well as in the United States. In this respect it brings us into a much wider set of issues about how we use historical terms—can we call contemporary political parties, movements, or leaders “fascists”? What about the term “Concentration Camp”? Is it exclusively about the Holocaust or can we apply it to other things, like contemporary detention centers?

As Dan argues in the book, words matter, and how we understand the life and afterlife of historical terms impacts how and why we can – or in some cases cannot – use them in a variety of contexts. It really gets at the heart of why history matters: Both that we should understand the history of ideas, concepts, and terms which have entered into the broad public lexicon, and also how we can understand the ways in which history and historical analogy can be used to understand broader contemporary issues, or when it should not.

**51: Black Power and Jewish Politics with Marc Dollinger** Aug 30, 2020
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Welcome back to Jewish History Matters. In this episode, Marc Dollinger joins us for an important conversation about the history of Black-Jewish relations in the 1960s, and its ramifications and relevance for the continued struggle for civil rights and racial justice today.

Marc Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University. He’s the author of Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America, and Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, which we discuss in this episode.

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Black Power, Jewish Politics reframes the place of Jews in the civil rights movement and the rise of black power in the 1960s. As Marc argues, American Jews tend to have a filiopietistic and self-congratulatory historical memory of these events emphasizing Jews’ place in a cold war liberal consensus, and as allies in the fight for civil rights, prior to a breakdown of this black-Jewish alliance with the rise of the Black Power movement. Marc doesn’t deny that this alliance existed, but he offers a new way of thinking about it and its legacy: He argues that Jewish leaders recognized the limits of white allyship early on, and later supported Black power—both in itself and also as an example of how to pursue Jewish empowerment. As Marc argues, the emergence of Jewish ethnic identity in the 1970s — Jewish day schools, the Jewish catalogue, Jewish studies courses, just to name a few — actually paralleled the broader context of American life in which various ethnic groups drew from the example of Black power to chart their own course within the framework of identity politics.

However, the struggle for civil rights and racial justice is not concluded in this country, so this book is about the past but it’s not entirely history. As a result it offers one starting point for rethinking the relationship between Jews and civil rights both historically speaking and today, the question of whether Jews are white, or are perceived as white, and the ramifications of all this within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement. As we’ll get into today, this book and its argument offers a pathway towards rethinking this history, our place within it, and what it might mean to be an ally in the fight for social and racial justice today.

**50: We Are All Implicated in Violence and Oppression, Both Historical and Present-Day: A Conversation with Michael Rothberg** Jun 07, 2020
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Listen in for an important conversation with Michael Rothberg about how we understand violence—both in history and in our own present day—and our place within it. This is obviously an important set of timely issues, both intellectually and politically, which relate closely to Michael’s recent book The Implicated Subject, which is a major focus of our conversation. But the book is just a starting point for the bigger question of how we can understand ourselves as implicated in the legacy of historical violence, as well as present-day oppression.

Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA, and he holds the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies there. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators is his most recent book, and he’s also the author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000).

Purchase The Implicated Subject on Amazon
Read an excerpt from the introduction to The Implicated Subject
Read Michael’s essay about Achille Mbembe, “Specters of Comparison,” which we also discuss

The Implicated Subject is a really important book because it raises the fundamental challenge that no one is really innocent when it comes to historical injustices – even those of us who were born long after the events took place. As he writes, when we think about injustice there are not just perpetrators and victims, but many people are also implicated—as people who enable systemic violence and oppression, or benefit in some fashion even without thinking about it, or who bear responsibility for the legacies of historical injustice. It’s an important term to add to our vocabulary, to think about the history of the implicated subject – of those people who have agency over their lives, as subjects, and are implicated in the history of violence and injustice, as well as systems of oppression in our own day, and its a call for reflection and for action to fight oppression, injustice, and inequality when we think about our own place within it. I’m so glad to be able to discuss this with Michael, because I think that he offers an important conceptual framework and a challenge to all of us as we think about history, about memory, and about our own lives.

**49: Why Jewish Books and Libraries Matter with Joshua Teplitsky** May 24, 2020
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Joshua Teplitsky joins us to discuss his book Prince of the Press and the broader issue of the history of Jewish books and book collecting. Prince of the Press is a fantastic book, and it opens up a great set of issues about the meaning of books and libraries in Jewish culture, the process of accumulating and transmitting Jewish learning over the generations, as well as how we understand Jewish life in early modern Europe in the widest terms.

Purchase Prince of the Press from Yale University Press, and use the code YEPRP for a 25% discount
Begin reading the introduction to Prince of the Press

Joshua Teplitsky is assistant professor of history at Stony Brook University. Prince of the Press, which tells the story of the Prague rabbi David Oppenheim and his library, is his first book, and it was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Josh specializes in the history of the Jews in Europe in the early modern period and in the study of books and media, and is one of the leaders of the Footprints project which seeks to document the history of the movement of early printed Jewish books and manuscripts.

Prince of the Press is such a phenomenal book on many levels. It tells the story of David Oppenheim and his collection of books, so it’s a microhistory, telling history on a very personal scale. But the story of Oppenheim and his library, like all great microhistories, has something bigger to teach us about the nature of Jewish culture within early modern Europe, and about European book culture at large. What does it mean to collect books? How do we transmit knowledge, from person to person or from generation to generation, in terms of both information as well as physical terms? This book Prince of the Press helps us to think about all of those things and more.

**48: Modern Orthodox Judaism with Zev Eleff** May 10, 2020
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Zev Eleff joins the podcast to discuss his recent book Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life and the broader topic of the history of modern Orthodox Judaism and why it matters—both in terms of the developments in American Jewish life, and also American religion at large.

Zev Eleff is the Chief Academic Officer of Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, IL, and Associate Professor of Jewish History at Touro College. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Authentically Orthodox as well as Modern Orthodox Judaism: A Documentary History. Also over the past couple of months, he’s also has been teaching his course on the history of orthodox Judaism online with a series of fantastic panel discussions on the topic with leading scholars, and he’s been posting the videos on YouTube. You can find a link in the show notes.

Purchase Authentically Orthodox from Wayne State University Press; use promo code POD1 for 30% off.
Check out Zev Eleff’s video lectures and panel discussions on the history of Orthodox Judaism, his Spring 2020 course which (like so many other scholars’ courses) were forced online

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

**47: Jews and Sex Work in Argentina with Mir Yarfitz and Geraldine Gudefin** Apr 26, 2020
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Mir Yarfitz joins the podcast to discuss his book Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina, and the big-picture issues surrounding the history of migration, sex work and prostitution, and the morality tale of “white slavery.” As he describes in the book, and dives into in this wide-ranging conversation, looking closely at this history both offers a new light on the history of Jews in Argentina and also indicates important ways in which we can rethink the phenomenon of sex work as well as the stakes of debates about migration and immigration. Notably, he argues that we should recognize the agency of the historical actors just as much as contemporary figures in these spheres, and also that the history of the terms of the discourse surrounding sex work is closely connected to the criminalization and racialization of immigrants, both within the twentieth-century Argentine context as well as in twenty-first century America.

Purchase Impure Migration at Amazon

Mir Yarfitz is an Associate Professor at Wake Forest University’s Department of History. Impure Migration is his first book.

This episode is guest hosted by Geraldine Gudefin, a scholar of modern Jewish studies currently teaching at American University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Brandeis University in 2018, and her research is focused on migration, gender, and the intersection of law and religion in French and American Jewish history.

An edited transcript of the conversation will be available shortly.

**46: Putting Partition in Global Context with Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov** Apr 12, 2020
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Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov join us to talk about the history of partition—separating territories and peoples to create new states—and why it matters in a global context. In the book which Laura and Arie co-edited, Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separation, they and the many authors who contributed to the project have brought together three important cases of partition in the twentieth century: Ireland in the 1920s, Israel and Palestine in 1937 and 1947, and India and Pakistan in 1948. It’s a phenomenal project that highlights the intersection of geopolitical developments and allows us to tie together what are usually seen as national histories in a global sense.

Read the introduction to Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separation
Purchase Partitions on Amazon
Watch a video of Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov speaking about their book at the University of Texas at Austin

Laura Robson is a professor of history at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which appeared in 2017, explores the history of forced migration, population exchanges, and refugee resettlement in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine during the interwar period.

Arie Dubnov holds the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies at George Washington University. Arie’s a historian of twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, and decolonization. Among his publications are an intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012) and the edited volume Zionism—A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), which seeks to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory.

**45: Jewish Emancipation with David Sorkin** Mar 29, 2020
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In this episode, we’re joined by David Sorkin to talk about the history of Jewish emancipation, the process of Jews gaining (and sometimes losing) civic and civil rights in modern times. Listen in for a fascinating conversation about David’s recent book Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.

Purchase Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries at Amazon

David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale’s Department of History. He’s a leading scholar in modern jewish history and particularly the social, intellectual, and political transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – which he looks at this this book through the lens of Emancipation.

Jewish Emancipation synthesizes the legal and historical pathways of emancipation against a broad geographical and chronological backdrop in western and central Europe which much of the traditional discussion of emancipation has emphasized, both also including the Ottoman Empire and the U.S., where many have passed over the history of emancipation on the basis of assumptions that emancipation is a European story, or that Jews never needed emancipating in the US. The book also extends our timeline. Instead of focusing on the French Revolution and its aftermath as a one-time event, the book traces the history of emancipation as a process from the sixteenth century to the present, suggesting that this is a story which still isn’t over yet — especially when we consider Israel and the question of rights and citizenship there.

We’re really excited to share our conversation. David’s book presents a starting point for a wide-ranging discussion about how we understand Jewish emancipation. As David suggests, we talk about emancipation and know that this is an important juncture in modern Jewish history, but it paradoxically also has been neglected — so when we look at this history more closely, we can think about why emancipation matters not only for how we understand Jewish history, but as a history that illuminates and illustrates the development of modernity on a much larger scale.

An edited transcript of the episode will be available shortly.

**44: Jewish History in Iran with Lior Sternfeld** Mar 15, 2020
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Lior Sternfeld joins the podcast to discuss his book Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran and the big-picture issues it raises about the history of Iran, the history of the Jews in the Middle East, and Jewish history as a whole.

Listen in for our conversation about how we can conceptualize the history of Iranian Jews through the ways Jews were a part of the broader culture and history of the country and the region.

Lior Sternfeld is an assistant professor of history and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in the histories of the Jewish people and other minorities of the region.

Purchase Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran from Stanford University Press (use code STERNFELD20 for a 20% discount)
Read an excerpt from the introduction of Between Iran and Zion

Two other recent articles we discussed included:

“How did November become the Mizrahi Heritage Month? And what’s Mizrahi anyhow?” by Lior Sternfeld and Arie Dubnov (History News Network, Dec. 1, 2019)
“Israel Is Rewriting the History of Middle Eastern Jews for Propaganda,” by Lior Sternfeld and Menashe Anzi (Haaretz, Dec. 2, 2019)

An edited transcript of the episode will be available shortly.

**43: A Rosenberg by Any Other Name? Jewish Name-Changing and American Jewish History with Kirsten Fermaglich and Geraldine Gudefin** Mar 01, 2020
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What’s in a name? For many American Jews who changed their names in the twentieth century so they would sound “less Jewish,” clearly a lot. In this episode, guest host Geraldine Gudefin welcomes Kirsten Fermaglich to speak about her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America and the big issues it brings up: Name changing is the butt of many jokes, but it’s a really serious topic that illuminates the history of antisemitism in America and the power of bureaucracy in society. As Kirsten stresses, the way this story has been told is important too. Apocryphal tales about Ellis Island officials changing peoples’ names elide the importance of agency in Jewish history. As her books shows, Jews’ names were not being changed by others, but it was an active choice. Listen in for a fascinating conversation about why names are an important window into understanding American Jewish history and culture, for understanding the history of antisemitism, and for reframing our understanding of Jewish history to see how Jews have had more agency and control over their destiny.

Purchase A Rosenberg by Any Other Name on Amazon
Read Kirsten Fermaglich, “‘My Name Proved to Be a Great Handicap’” (Tablet, 2018)

Kirsten Fermaglich is an associate professor at Michigan State University’s Department of History. Her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name, which we’re looking at today, explores the history of name changing in the United States in the twentieth century, and her first book, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares, looked at secular Jewish intellectuals’ uses of the Holocaust in the early 1960s.

Geraldine Gudefin, who is guest hosting this episode, is a scholar of modern Jewish studies currently teaching at American University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Brandeis University in 2018, and her research is focused on migration, gender, and the intersection of law and religion in French and American Jewish history.

An edited transcript of the conversation will be available shortly.

**42: Family Papers and the Sephardic Twentieth Century with Sarah Abrevaya Stein** Feb 16, 2020
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Sarah Stein joins the podcast to talk about her recent book, Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century, and how looking closely at the history of one family can tell us the story of an entire century.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is a Professor of History and holds the Maurice Amado Endowed Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA’s Department of History, and she also is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. Besides Family Papers, just a few of her many other notable books include Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2008), and Sephardi Lives, an incredible documentary history which she co-edited with Julia Phillips Cohen.

Purchase Family Papers on Amazon
Read an excerpt from Family Papers: “A Family Tree Forever Changed by Disaster”

Family Papers is just phenomenal, and it’s gotten a lot of attention recently: The Economist named it one of the best books of 2019, and it was also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Beyond the awards and accolades, Family Papers provides an entryway into an important discussion about diaspora histories, the pathways of Sephardic Jews across the twentieth century, and the importance of everyday historical materials. These “family papers” of the Levi family not only give us the book’s evocative title, but they also animate and give life to a tremendously rich story and bring us to think about our own place in history.

**41: Social Justice and Israel/Palestine with Mira Sucharov and Aaron Hahn Tapper** Feb 02, 2020
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Mira Sucharov and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper join us to talk about about their recent volume, Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: Foundational and Contemporary Debates.

Purchase Social Justice and Israel/Palestine on Amazon

Aaron J. Hahn Tapper is the Mae and Benjamin Swig Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of San Francisco, and he’s the founding Director of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice there. He has co-edited two volumes Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities, with Reza Aslan (2011) and Social Justice and Israel/Palestine. He also is the author of the excellent textbook Judaisms: A Twenty-First-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities (2016).

Mira Sucharov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Carlton University. Her first book was The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (which appeared in 2005), and she also recently published Public Influence: A Guide to Op-Ed Writing and Social Media Engagement, published in 2019 by the University of Toronto Press).

Social Justice and Israel Palestine: Foundational and Contemporary Debates is a fantastic volume that brings together over twenty scholars to talk about critical issues like what it means to have multiple narratives, definition of settler-colonialism, the meaning of international law, the question of refugees, apartheid, and BDS.

It’s an important volume by itself, and it’s also a great jumping-off point for our discussion today about how we can bring together social justice with scholarly and intellectual perspectives on Israel-Palestine.

This episode pairs really well with our most recent conversation with Rachel Harris about teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict. In that episode, Rachel talked about how Israel and Palestine can really be a hot topic, and some of the challenges with teaching the subject. Here, Mira and Aaron continue this conversation about the role of scholars and scholarship in approaching this whole subject: can we really and truly be totally objective? How can we engage with a subject that is an important social justice issue, and also when we know that our students and members of the public all have opinions of their own, and usually pretty strong ones? Mira and Aaron we dive into what the connection between scholarly work and the social justice issues of Israel and Palestine—a major way in which history matters, because through history we can better understand pressing issues of the day and as historians and experts we have something to contribute.

A transcript of the episode will be available shortly.

39: In Geveb and Yiddish Studies Online with Jessica Kirzane and Saul Noam Zaritt Jan 05, 2020

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Jessica Kirzane and Saul Zaritt join the podcast to talk about their work on In Geveb, an online journal of Yiddish studies.

Jessica Kirzane is the Lecturer in Yiddish at the University of Chicago, and she’s the editor-in-chief of In Geveb. She recently published a translation of Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020).

Saul Noam Zaritt is an assistant professor of Yiddish Literature in Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature. He was also one of the founding editors of In Geveb.

In Geveb is a really exciting journal that publishes important peer reviewed research in Yiddish studies, translations, and also on topics relating to pedagogy. We hope you enjoy our conversation about In Geveb, what it represents as part of the field of Yiddish studies, and how we can think about open-access and what that means for the question of making Jewish studies and Yiddish studies accessible to a wide audience.

Articles and topics discussed in the episode include:

38: The Life and Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Conversation with Susannah Heschel Dec 22, 2019

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Susannah Heschel joins us to talk about the work and legacy of her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel: What we take away from Heschel’s writings as well as his moral and political example, and what we still have to learn from him today. We also talk about Susannah’s efforts to publish her father’s writings as well as her own research in modern Jewish history and Jewish thought. Indeed, she’s a towering scholar in her own right and we’re delighted to have her on the podcast for a wide ranging discussion about the meaning and context of one her father’s work, and also how it relates to her own research and thinking about Jewish thought and why it matters.

Susannah Heschel is the Eli Black professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. She’s written extensively on Jewish and German intellectual history, including her books Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus and ‌The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. She’s also played a major part in the continuing publication of the work of Abraham Joshua Heschel, including Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, which appeared in 1998.

For those who aren’t familiar with Abraham Joshua Heschel, he was one of the most important Jewish writers, theologians, and political activists of the twentieth century. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, a scion of a preeminent family of Hasidic rabbis, and he pursued his doctorate in Berlin in the 1920s where he also studied at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the rabbinical seminary and institute of higher Jewish learning in Berlin. In 1940, Heschel fled to the US where he took a position at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and then in 1946 he began teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.

It’s been almost a half-century since Heschel’s passing in 1972, but his work still speaks to so many people. In this episode we look at why that is, and what we can learn from him today. Heschel was a prolific writer, and he penned a series of important books and essays including a pathbreaking study of the Prophets, theological writings including The Sabbath, Man is Not Alone, and God in Search of Man. He was also a political activist and deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement, famously marching alongside Martin Luther King in Selma.

In this episode we speak with Susannah Heschel about her father, his writings and his work, his thought and his theology, and his political legacy too.

Books, essays, and topics discussed in this episode include:

Books by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Books by Susannah Heschel
- Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (1998)
- The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (2010)
Susannah Heschel, “A Friendship in the Prophetic Tradition: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Telos)
Arthurt Green, “Three Warsaw Mystics“
Arnold Eisen, “Theology, Sociology, Ideology: Jewish Thought in America, 1925-1955” (Modern Judaism, 1982)
Van Harvey, Feuerbach and the Study of Religion
Yosef Haym Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

37: Censorship in Early Modern Europe and its Ramifications with Hannah Marcus Dec 01, 2019

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What is censorship? How can we identify it, and understand how it functions and what are its effects? Hannah Marcus joins us for a fascinating discussion about her research on the history of the censorship of scientific and medical texts in early modern Italy which opens up a wide-ranging set of issues about the nature of censorship in historical context and the control of knowledge in more recent times, too.

Hannah Marcus is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1450 and 1700. She is writing a book titled Forbidden knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy.

In our conversation we discuss a different form of censorship from what many people assume or expect—instead of burning books, we find a phenomenon where scientific texts deemed illicit by the Catholic church (often because they were written by Protestant authors) were made licit through a process of editing and expurgation, where certain passages or names were crossed out or blacked out. Clearly, censorship is a process of the restriction and control of knowledge, but what we see here is process whereby censorship was a mechanism for making available, at least to certain people. By looking at censorship-as-promulgation, as opposed to censorship-as-restriction, we flip on its head our common understanding of what censorship is and assumptions about how it works that gives us a broad framework for thinking through censorship and the control of knowledge in more contemporary contexts as well. In this respect this episode brings forward important issues about why history matters at large, and also the way in which Jewish history intersects with a wide range of fields.

Last year, Hannah joined the Starr Fellow seminar at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and she was amazingly able to come to almost all of the sessions, which is quite a feat in general—made all the more so if we consider that she herself isn’t a historian who focuses on Jewish history in particular. Of course, her research on censorship intersected with the discussions we were having about the history of the book in general. But it just was so fabulous to have someone like Hannah join us who doesn’t focus on Jewish history, but wants to engage with the kinds of questions and issues that Jewish history brings up. Hannah’s work demonstrates how the toolkit of Jewish history is something that scholars of all types can draw upon, and how Jewish history is useful for a range of scholarly and intellectual activity, both for those of us who are studying the Jews specifically and also the many more people who work on and think about other subjects.

It’s also a very important and interesting issue on its own. Even though we aren’t always talking about Jewish history so specifically, we highlight some of the ways history matters broadly. When we study and talk about censorship in a historical context, like so many other historical topics, we find conceptual tools and comparative frameworks that allow us to pose questions and consider important topics. In this way we can learn from the past so that we can understand the complex nature of censorship, both in early modern Europe as well as in more contemporary contexts as well.

Some books, articles, and topics we discussed in the episode include:

Some of Hannah’s articles on theses topics include:
- “Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice” (Aug. 2017)
- “The Mind of the Censor: Girolamo Rossi, a Physician and Censor for the Congregation of the Index” (2018)
- “Bibliography and Book Bureaucracy: Reading Licenses and the Circulation of Prohibited Books in Counter-Reformation Italy” (2016)
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, The Editor, and The Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
Annabel Patterson’s notion of the hermeneutics of censorship, see: Censorship and Interpretation. The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century
Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on editing and erasing digital files, also see Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing

36: What Happens to Jewish Culture Without Jews with Alanna Cooper and Hillel Smith Nov 17, 2019

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What happens to our stuff when we’re gone? Hillel Smith and Alanna Cooper join the podcast to talk about their projects that consider what happens to Jewish communities and their stuff, both buildings and objects, especially when we look at communities and synagogues that shrink, disappear, merge together, or move from one place to another.

This is an important issue because when we consider Jewish history in the twentieth century at a 30,000 foot level, one overarching development we might identify is the consolidation of Jewish populations and communities into a handful of countries and major metropolitan centers. Of course, most of this was not by choice, given the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. But if we look at the overall trend, Jews were once found in almost every country on earth – and while you can still more or less find Jews everywhere the vast majority of Jews are today found in Israel and the US, and a handful of countries; and within them, Jews today are consolidating more and more into major metro areas. In our conversation today we look at this in terms of material culture, as Alanna and Hillel are looking closely at this process of communal consolidation and movement which is still going on, when we look at what is left behind as the “traces” of Jewish life in this landscape.

Links to topics and issues we discuss today:

Hillel Smith’s Jewish Traces project
Alanna Cooper, “Preserving the past at what cost? Restoring L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple” (Cleveland Jewish News, Mar. 2019)
- Also see: Trailer for the documentary “Restoring Tomorrow” (2018)
Alanna Cooper, “When An Old Synagogue Downsizes, What Do You Do With All Its Stuff?” (Forward, Sept. 2018)
Alanna Cooper, “A Rust Belt synagogue ‘runs out of people’ and gathers to bury its past” (JTA, Jan. 2018)
The Lost Mural (Burlington, VT)

Alanna Cooper is a cultural anthropologist and currently serves as director of Case Western Reserve’s Jewish Lifelong Learning Program. She’s the author of Bukharan Jews and the Dynamics of Global Judaism, published in 2013, and is writing a book entitled Preserving and Disposing of the Sacred: American Jewish Congregations. In 2020 she’ll be joining Case Western’s Department of Religious Studies as the Abba Hillel Silver Professor in Jewish Studies.

Hillel Smith is a prolific artist and graphic designer who uses contemporary media to create new manifestations of traditional Jewish forms. He’s painted murals in Southern California, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Jerusalem, and at the Fendi headquarters in Rome, and he’s pursued online projects like “Parsha Posters” and now “Jewish Traces,” which is supported by Asylum Arts. You can find Hillel’s art and other projects at hillelsmith.info, and the Jewish Traces project, which we talk about in the episode, at www.jewishtraces.com.

Alanna and Hillel’s interest clearly align, inasmuch as both of them are thinking about what happens to the stuff of Jewish culture:

Hillel’s “Jewish Traces” project highlights the monumental buildings and architecture that serve as a material foundation of Jewish life. Cities and communities are always evolving, and Jews are always on the move as part of this. As Jewish communities dwindle, or get too large, they often sell their buildings or abandon them, leaving “traces” of Jewish life throughout the urban and suburban landscape. Through this Jewish Traces project, Hillel is documenting photographing, and annotating some of these “traces” of Judaism and their adaptive reuse in new contexts.

Alanna’s research asks similar, but distinctive, questions about the development of Jewish culture. She looks at communities that merge, shut down, or downsize, and what happens to the buildings as well as parts of buildings: stained glass windows, yizkor memorial plaques, monuments, and so on. Alanna examines the decisions people make about what they leave behind, what they preserve, and what they choose to let go of, and how these decisions are informed by their understanding of their own place in history.

We are so excited to speak with Alanna and Hillel because these projects illuminate some of the issues relating to the nature of material culture in Jewish life, what gets left behind, what is preserved or reused in surprising ways, and by looking at individual cases of cities and communities we can understand the big picture of Jewish history in recent times.

34: Contemporary Yiddish Culture (and Podcasts!) with Sandra Fox Oct 23, 2019

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In this episode, we’re joined by Sandra Fox to talk about contemporary Yiddish culture and her Yiddish-language feminist podcast, Vaybertaytsh. The podcast recently came back for a new season, and so we’re going to be talking about the origin of the podcast as part of the development of contemporary Yiddish culture and its history. Among other things, we discuss the ties between Yiddish language podcasting and Jewish camping, which is the focus of Sandy’s research. She recently published an article in American Jewish History on these issues of post-Holocaust Yiddish culture titled “‘Laboratories of Yiddishkayt’: Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps and the Transformation of Yiddishism,” which we also will discuss in the episode.

Sandra Fox is the Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University, and she also hosts and produces the podcast Vaybertaytsh, a Yiddish-language feminist podcast. Her research focuses on the history of Jewish camping in North America.

You can check out Vaybertaytsh online at vaybertaytsh.com. The episodes are in Yiddish but they also prepare transcripts and every once in a while also an episode in English. It’s a fabulous and unique project, and we’re excited to discuss it here.

33: Ultra-Orthodox Jews on Israeli TV with Shayna Weiss Oct 06, 2019

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In this episode we’re excited to share a presentation by Shayna Weiss about Israeli TV titled “Black is the New Black: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Israel, and the Globalization of Television,” and a conversation with her about Israeli television, the representation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in this medium, and why this matters as we put Israel in a global context.

Shayna Weiss is the associate director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the intersection of religion and gender in the Israeli public sphere, as well as the politics of Israeli popular culture. This comes together in a book manuscript she’s currently working on, about gender segregation in the Israeli public sphere, as well as her work on Israeli TV.

TV Shows and articles mentioned in the episode include:

Shitsel (watch on Netflix)
Our Boys (watch on HBO)
- Emily Nussbaum, “‘Our Boys’ and the Economics of Empathy” (The New Yorker, Sept. 2019)
Juda (watch on Hulu)
Merchak Negia, A Touch Away (2006; watch on Amazon)
Autonomies (watch trailer)
- pilot available on YouTube with English subtitles
Shababnikim
Arab Labor
Kathmandu

We were so glad to have Shayna join us here at the University of Texas at Austin for this exciting presentation, which we are excited to share via the podcast. These issues are really important, as we think about Israeli culture in its global context—with television serving as a fascinating window into how Israel represents itself on the world stage, the place of religion in Israeli society, and how Israel relates to the global marketplace.

If you’re interested in having Shayna speak about these issues and other related topics about popular culture, gender, and religion in modern and contemporary Israel, you can reach out to her by email at shaynaw AT brandeis.edu.

Shayna’s visit, and this episode, was made possible through the support and cosponsorship of the Israel Institute, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT Austin, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Radio-Television-Film, and the Department of Religious Studies.

32: A Jewish Annotated New Testament with Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine Sep 22, 2019

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Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine join us to discuss the Jewish Annotated New Testament: what it means to have a “Jewish” version of the New Testament, how we can effectively understand the New Testament as a “Jewish” book within its historical and social context, and why all this matters in terms of scholarly developments as well as the relationship between Judaism and Christianity today.

Purchase the Jewish Annotated New Testament on Amazon

Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Jewish Studies at Duke University’s Department of Religious Studies. He’s published widely on the Bible on topics including metaphor, the nature of biblical historical texts, and gender issues. His many books include the Jewish Study Bible, which he co-edited with Adele Berlin; How to Read the Jewish Bible; The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously; and The Creation of History in Ancient Israel; among many others.

Amy-Jill Levine is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and College of Arts and Sciences; she’s also an Affiliated Professor at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations at Cambridge. Currently she is teaching at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. AJ’s books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus; The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us (co-authored with Douglas Knight); The New Testament, Methods and Meanings (co-authored with Warren Carter), Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; Entering the Passion of Jesus; and, most recently The Gospel of Luke (co-authored with Ben Witherington III).

Marc and AJ, as two tremendously prolific scholars of the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, each have deep knowledge of the historical context of the New Testament as well as of how it has been interpreted over the centuries. Together, they edited the Jewish Annotated New Testament in 2011, and they subsequently produced a second, expanded edition in 2017.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament has four main components: The text of the New Testament itself (using the New Revised Standard Version translation), introduction to the Gospels and Acts, and to the Epistles and Revelation, introductions to each of the books and extensive annotations to the text, and over 50 essays on topics including the historical and social context of the New Testament, Jewish religious movements of the Second Temple period, Jewish practices and beliefs, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, and Jewish responses to Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, and Mary the mother of Jesus throughout the centuries.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament, as we discuss in this episode, highlights the historical and religious context of the New Testament as a set of Jewish texts—that is to say, texts written about Jews and in many cases by people who were themselves Jews, knowledgeable in Jewish theological traditions and textual interpretation. Throughout history, too many people have forgotten (or consciously ignored) that Jesus was a Jew, as were all of his first followers; or, they have sought to instrumentalize this history for polemical purposes. There has been, of course, a great deal of serious scholarship on the New Testament over the centuries, but the NT has also been at the center of sometimes violent debates between Jews and Christians, too. It thus represents a particularly interesting though sometimes problematic text, especially when we keep in mind that several passages have prompted dangerous anti-Jewish stereotypes and narratives at the heart of centuries of animosity. At the same time, one can point to the changing dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations especially after the Holocaust, in part through Christians, as individuals and as Church communions trying to come to terms both with what the New Testament says about Jews and how those texts have been interpreted. In a certain way, part of what I think is so interesting about the Jewish Annotated New Testament is that it is very much a product of our time: a synthesis of the newest academic scholarship, first of all, and it also represents the possibilities of Jewish-Christian relations today.

With this history and context in mind, Marc and AJ have accomplished the remarkable feat of presenting the New Testament in a scholarly, readable, and accessible format for Jews, without any kind of aim of proselytizing—indeed, they are both themselves Jews. It’s also a valuable resource for Christian and indeed for any readers who will want to better understand these texts and their historical and social context, and especially for religious leaders who want to be able to better understand and teach about Judaism, Jesus, his followers and Christian origins in the first and early second centuries of the Common Era. The annotations and essays distill generations of scholarship on the background and meaning of these texts, their contexts, and their reception and ramifications. When necessary, they confront those passages that have been a source for anti-Judaism. As a result, the book presents a useful resource for students, scholars, as well as teachers and religious leaders: In situating the New Testament within its historical context, the volume demonstrates how and why the New Testament matters in terms of our understanding of the development of Judaism in the first and second centuries, and also why and how this context is critical in terms of comprehending the emergence of early Christianity and the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.

Bonus Episode: Why Modern Jewish Studies Matters with Mirjam Thulin and Jeffrey Blutinger Jun 24, 2019

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We are joined today by Mirjam Thulin and Jeffrey Blutinger for a conversation about the past and future of modern Jewish studies. We’ll look at what’s at stake when in how people write and tell the history of the Jews, and delve into why studying the Jews has mattered over the course of two centuries of modern Jewish studies, and why it still matters today.

This episode is produced in conjunction with Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, where an article is appearing in the latest issue that introduces the podcast project and places it in cultural and historical context. Read the article, “Introducing Jewish History Matters.” (If you don’t have access and you’d like a PDF, you can email Jason at jasonlustig AT gmail.com.)

Jeffrey Blutinger is Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach, where he holds the Barbara and Ray Alpert Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and is the director of the Jewish studies program. His research has focused on nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship and in particular the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), who published the tremendously popular eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews), which was widely translated and republished well into the twentieth century, and he is currently preparing a book on Graetz. His recent work includes the study of the Holocaust education and commemoration, and you can check out recent articles of his including “Bearing witness: Teaching the Holocaust from a victim-centered perspective” and “Creatures from Before the Flood: Reconciling Science and Genesis in the Pages of a Nineteenth-Century Hebrew Newspaper.”

Mirjam Thulin is a research associate in Jewish studies at the Leibniz Institut for European History in Mainz, and she teaches at the Göthe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her work has focused on the international network of scholars centered around David Kaufmann, a student of Graetz’s who lived from 1852 until his untimely death in 1899, looking both at Kaufmann and this network to think about the global development of Jewish studies. Read Mirjam’s recent article, “Disciplining Jewish Knowledge: Cultures of Wissenschaft des Judentums at 200.”

Together, Mirjam and Jeffrey each offer a really interesting perspective on the nature and history of Jewish studies based on their reflections on how and why history has mattered for people like Graetz, Kaufmann, and others.

In our conversation, we consider the rise of academic scholarship of the Jews, how it has been put to use by both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, and how it continues to be relevant in terms of Jews’ position in the societies in which they have lived and for our understanding of the contemporary globalized world. We also explore why talking about historians of the past matters, even those who are not widely read today. Historiography is not just an obscure academic topic, something just to be studied on the path towards PhD exam, and it’s not just a kind of navel-gazing either. It’s a means to comprehend broad cultural and social trends: in the case of Jewish history, the rise of historical consciousness and the application of historical narratives and arguments which underpinned the development of modern Jewish culture, religion, and politics.

When we think about Jewish studies over the past two centuries we can look for instance to Leopold Zunz and his colleagues who launched the modern study of Jewish history in the 1820s under the banner of “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” or the science of Judaism—but it wasn’t just an academic subject or inquiry for them. Zunz and his friends hoped to wrest the study of the Jews from the hands of Christian figures who they saw, more or less correctly, as trying to missionize to the Jews. They also aimed to use Jewish studies to advance their program of emancipation and integration. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I would say, Jewish history has mattered because scholars and the public have looked to the Jewish past in order to justify all kinds of religious and political programs: The study of Jewish history played an important role in debates over religious reforms, inasmuch as historicizing Judaism and the Bible helped to explain and justify the possibility to make changes to ritual, liturgy, and religious practices in their own day. ANd Jewish historical narratives, in their various interpretations and presentations, also played critical roles in the development of new nationalist ideologies as well as opposition to nationalism.

With all this in mind, we wanted to center historiography, and the past and future of Jewish studies, because it provides a window into the issues that Jewish History Matters as a project engages at large.

30: Roundtable Discussion on the Materiality of Jewish Culture with Aleksandra Buncic, Nathan Mastnjack, David Sclar, and Jason Lustig May 26, 2019

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Listen to a roundtable discussion on the materiality of Jewish culture with B Buncic, David Sclar, Nathan Mastnjack, and Jason Lustig, who in 2018-19 have been Harry Starr Fellows in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. The theme this year has been the history of the Jewish book, and we come together to discuss why books matter in Jewish culture and why we should look at the material objects, writing platforms, and physical form in addition to the contents that they contain.

Thanks to Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies for hosting us this year, and also for helping support the production of this episode.

**29: What Does It Mean for Israel to be a “Jewish” State? Defining Israel with Simon Rabinovitch** May 12, 2019
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Simon Rabinovitch joins us to talk about Israel’s nation-state law and his volume Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy and the Law—the origins, development, and ramifications of Israel’s nation-state law, how we can contextualize it, and try to understand its importance and meaning for the ongoing debates over the character of the state of Israel.

Purchase Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law on Amazon

Simon Rabinovitch is an assistant professor at Boston University. In addition to Defining Israel, his books include Jewish Rights, National Rights: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial Russia, and the anthology Jews and Diaspora Nationalism, published as part of the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought.

27: Pedagogy and Public Engagement in Jewish Studies with Lori Lefkovitz, Sara Wolkenfeld, Matt Williams, Jason Lustig, and Pamela Nadell Apr 14, 2019

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Listen to a roundtable discussion about pedagogy and public engagement from the December 2018 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston, where Lori Lefkovitz, Sara Wolkenfeld, Matt Williams, and Jason Lustig, along with Pamela Nadel, who chaired the roundtable, talked about the role of scholars in the public sphere and how it relates to teaching, pedagogy, and technology.

We put together the panel in the context of rapid developments in public humanities, digital humanities, and delivery systems for education. Today, scholars are increasing their efforts to communicate their works’ importance to a broad public — and this podcast is just one such example. Further, we wanted to explore how Jewish Studies faces distinct opportunities and challenges in translating scholarly work for multiple audiences.

We hope this roundtable, which we recorded to share as an episode of the podcast, will continue to spark conversations about how Jewish Studies engages multiple publics—with students, Jewish communities and organizations, and the wider world—and the role of scholars in shaping public conversations. Considering pedagogy in a broadly defined sense, we wanted to address how we combine teaching with public engagement: how and why teaching reaches outside the classroom and what tools (digital and otherwise) we use to present Jewish Studies as a topic of vital public need.

Lori Lefkovitz is the Ruderman Professor and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Northeastern University and the Director of the Humanities Center there.

Matt Williams serves as the Director of the Center for Communal Research at the Orthodox Union.

Sara Wolkenfeld is the Director of Education and Community Engagement at Sefaria.org.

Jason Lustig is presently a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and the Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. He also is the host of Jewish History Matters.

Pamela Nadel, who chaired the session, is a professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University. She also is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies.

**26: Could It Happen Here? Fascism and Nazism in America with Steve Ross** Mar 31, 2019
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Could fascists really have taken power in the US during the 1930s? It’s not just the stuff of fiction, as in “The Man in the High Castle” and The Plot Against America. In Steve Ross’ book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, we learn about the thrilling (and terrifying) history of how Nazis and fascists tried to establish a foothold on the west coast and the efforts of a handful of spies to try to take them down. In this episode, Steve joins us to talk about his book and the history of fascist and pro-Nazi groups in LA, the real threat that fascism posed in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and what it teaches us, unfortunately, about our present moment.

Purchase Hitler in Los Angeles on Amazon

Steven J. Ross is Professor of History at USC, where he serves as Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of Jewish Role in American Life. He has written widely on working-class history, social history, film history, and political history, and his book Hitler in Los Angeles was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History for 2018.

In this episode we also discussed a conference that took place at the USC Shoah Foundation in November 2018, “New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison.” You can view the presentations online, including Steve Ross’.

**25: The Kishinev Pogrom with Steven Zipperstein** Mar 17, 2019
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Steven Zipperstein discusses the Kishinev pogrom and its afterlife in modern Jewish history and memory. Listen to our conversation about the tremendous influence of Kishinev on how Jews have seen the world, the dangers of misinformation and propaganda, and how one event can shape a generation. Ultimately, the pogrom highlights how and why history matters: how the Kishinev pogrom has become so influential in modern Jewish history, and also the tension between the public memory of the pogrom and the actual historical events themselves. Today, we’re in an age when actual facts and details do matter, but the Kishinev pogrom shows the power of myth and memory too.

Purchase Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History on Amazon

Steven Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. His many books include The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (published in 1986); Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (from 1993); Imagining Russian Jewry (1999); and Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (2008). Pogrom, which was published in 2018, is his most recent book and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History.

In Pogrom, Steven traces the origins and repercussions of the infamous outbreak of violence against the Jews in Kishinev in April 1903. One of the interesting things about the Kishinev pogrom is that the events in this backwater Bessarabian town—in today’s Ukraine—contributed to international developments that are almost surprising in their range and diversity: It’s widely known that Jews, in the aftermath of this pogrom, felt an increased urgency to resolve the uneasy situation of Jews in the Russian, leading to the further growth of the ZIonist movement. And in fact, the entire “Uganda controversy,” when Theodor Herzl seriously considered an offer from the British for land for a state in east Africa, today’s Kenya, resulted in the aftermath of Kishinev. Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote his tremendously influential poem “In the City of Slaughter” based on his visit to Kishinev in the pogrom’s aftermath.

In a similar way, it’s clear the the pogrom resulted from antisemitic fervor, and Steven also explores the way in which the pogrom contributed to the further development of antisemitism and in particular the publication and promulgation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And in another fascinating story, Steven explores the relationship between the Kishinev pogrom and the formation of the NAACP a few years later.

**24: Masculinity and American Jewish History with Sarah Imhoff** Mar 03, 2019
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Sarah Imhoff joins us to talk about her book Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism and how we can look at the history of gender to understand the development of American Jewish religion.

Purchase Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism on Amazon

Sarah Imhoff is a professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Indiana.

This episode is guest hosted by Lindsay King, a PhD candidate at the UCLA Department of History with a focus on modern Jewish history. Her research focuses on Jewish masculinity in 19th century Vienna.

**23: Holocaust Memory and the Digital Age with Jeffrey Shandler** Feb 17, 2019
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Jeffrey Shandler joins us to talk about Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and Memory Practices: How Holocaust memory and memorialization is changing in the digital age, the history and meaning of testimony and the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, and what the future holds in store for these memory practices.

Read the first chapter of Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age, “An Archive in Contexts”
Purchase Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age on Amazon

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works, including Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014) and Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (2009).

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the way in which digital technology is affecting memory practices, looking in particular at the Shoah Foundation Video History Archive at USC. He traces the history of the Video History Archive, examines its project, and considers the possibilities and challenges presented by video testimony as a medium and a genre.

**22: Modern Jewish Thought with Samuel Moyn and Eugene Sheppard** Feb 03, 2019
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Samuel Moyn and Eugene Sheppard join us to talk about the expansive vision of what constitutes modern Jewish thought that they are exploring through the various books in the multi-volume book series Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought, published by Brandeis University Press. The series brings together edited and translated sources relating to modern Jewish thought, broadly defined. Each of the books focuses on a theme, and topics have included Jews and race, Diaspora Nationalism, the Sabbatian movement, legal theories, and more. Listen in for our conversation with Eugene and Sam about how the series came together, what they have tried to achieve with it, and what it means to push the boundaries of modern Jewish thought.

This book series is particularly exciting because all too often, modern Jewish thought is usually associated, first, with philosophy and intellectual history, and second, with a “canon” of primarily German Jewish writers and texts. While the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought does engage squarely with this canon—indeed, they did publish a volume on Moses Mendelssohn, and there is a forthcoming volume on Spinoza—Sam, Eugene, and the other editors have been making a conscious effort to expand the terrain of modern Jewish thought by publishing materials that go beyond traditional understandings of the field. This is true in both geographical and conceptual terms, for instance with the books on Middle Eastern Jewish thought and the volume on Jews and race. Other volumes, like the collection on Diaspora nationalism, puts forward materials that represent a kind of “countertradition” to what most people think of when they think about the history of Jewish state-based nationalism. On the whole, the books aim to provide students and teachers with primary source materials that will allow us to study and teach Jewish history and Jewish thought in a way that matches up with some of the new developments and trends in the various fields of modern Jewish history. It’s a tremendous achievement, and an ongoing project which we are excited to be able to discuss on the podcast.

This episode is a collaboration between Jewish History Matters and the New Books in Jewish Studies podcast, and it is guest hosted by Moses Lapin, a graduate student in the Departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Eugene Sheppard is Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, and Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought there.

Samuel Moyn is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, and a Professor of History at Yale University.

Some of the books in the series that we discuss include:

Jews and Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and the United States, ed. Simon Rabinovitch (preview on Google Books)
Jews and Race: Writings on Identity and Difference, 1880–1940, ed. Mitchell B. Hart (preview on Google Books)
Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism, and the Origins of Jewish Modernity, ed. Pawel Maciejko (preview on Google Books)
Jewish Legal Theories: Writings on State, Religion, and Morality, ed. Leora Batnitsky and Yonathan Brafman (preview on Google Books)
Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics, ed. Sarah Hammerschlag (preview on Google Books)
Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michah Gottlieb (preview on Google Books)
Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writing on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958, ed. Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (preview on Google Books)

**21: Jews and Human Rights with James Loeffler** Jan 20, 2019
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James Loeffler discusses his book Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. We talk about why the history of human rights matters, and how it fits into modern Jewish history: Who were the Jews who played a role in the shaping of the idea of human rights and its legal framework, how it was that they were both interested in the particular rights of Jews and the universal rights of all human beings, how the state of Israel fits into all of this, and what this tells us about the nature of human rights within the context of the history of the twentieth century as well as today.

Read the Prologue to Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
Purchase Rooted Cosmopolitans on Amazon
Read James Loeffler’s New York Times op-ed, “The Zionist Founders of the Human Rights Movement” (May 2018)

James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia.

The book presents a fascinating history of human rights and the Jewish lawyers, rabbis, and other public figures who played a role in the shaping of its discourse in the twentieth century: Figures like: – Hirsch Lauterpacht, a Polish Zionist who helped develop the framework of international human rights law – Jacob Robinson, a leader of interwar Lithuanian Jewry who worked on the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials – Peter Benenson, a British lawyer who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and later founded Amnesty International – Jacob Blaustein, an American Jewish leader and a chief human rights booster in postwar U.S. foreign policy – Rabbi Maurice Perlzweig, a British Zionist, a founder of the World Jewish Congress, and a U.N. human rights activist.

In the book, Jim argues that instead of being “rootless cosmopolitans” – an antisemitic epithet from Stalin’s Russia referencing both Jews’ interest in internationalism and drawing from a well of distrust of Jews as foreign – instead of “rootless,” Jim argues that the history of human rights shows that Jews were intensely rooted in the places where they lived and also their own concerns about Jewish and minority rights. In fact, the figures he examines show the convergence between human rights and Zionism, at least in the pre-state era. And so, he traces the trajectory of the human rights discourse from the years following World War I through the Cold War in three acts: the emergence of human rights within the context of minority rights, the convergence of the idea of human rights with the question of how to secure Jewish rights, and then the way in which these two sets of issues diverged.

**20: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement with Sara Yael Hirschhorn** Jan 06, 2019
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Sara Yael Hirschhorn joins us to discuss her book City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement, and the big questions that it raises for how we understand Israel, American Jewry, and those American Jews who have moved to Israel and participated in the settler movement beyond the Green Line in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula: Why so many Israeli Jewish settlers are of American origin, how we can understand them as real people and not caricatures, and how looking closely at this group can help unsettle assumptions or preconceived notions about the nature of the settlements in the occupied territories.

Purchase City on a Hilltop
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, “Israeli Terrorists, Born in the U.S.A.” (NYT, 2015)
Follow Sara on Twitter at @SaraHirschhorn1

Sara Hirschhorn is Visiting Assistant Professor in Israel Studies at Northwestern University’s Crown Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. You can follow Sara on Twitter at @SaraHirschhorn1.

City on a Hilltop, which received the 2018 Choice Award as a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature, presents a fascinating study of American Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories: the West Bank, and before that in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip. She argues that the 1967 six-day war presented an important moment that catalyzed the immigration or Aliyah of many American Jews to Israel, many of whom ended up settling in the occupied territories. And through a series of case studies, she sheds light on a group which today constitutes about 60,000 Jews—out of a total of around 400,000 settlers total. This means that 15% of Israeli Jewish settlers are of American origin, which is far disproportional to the number of American Jews in Israel.

What she presents is quite fascinating, because it tell us something quite counterintuitive: instead of being paragons of conservativism, the American Jews she studies turn out to have been liberals in America! As a result, it causes us to question many of the assumptions that we might have about this group, and also to think through what caused this group to take the path that they did. As she argues, in a certain way they tried to bring about the dream of a “city on a hill” in Israel—as a “city on a hilltop.”

18: Why Teaching Jewish Studies Matters with Jenny Caplan Dec 09, 2018

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Jenny Caplan joins us to talk about why teaching and studying Jewish history and Jewish Studies matters. Listen to our conversation about how we teach and talk about Jewish studies and Jewish history, how we justify its study to our students, to our colleagues, and to the wider world, how we can reach diverse students—and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Jennifer Caplan, “‘Well At MY Temple in Scarsdale … ‘: Teaching Beyond the ‘Heritage Student’ in Three Institutions.” Shofar 32, no. 4 (2014): 105–121

Jennifer Caplan is an Assistant Professor at Towson University’s Dept of Philosophy and Religious Studies. She’s working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Humor and American Judaism,” and She teaches courses at Towson including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Introduction to Judaism, and courses on Jewish graphic novels, American Jewish humor, Jewish literature, and race, gender, sexuality and Judaism.

Roundtable on the Attack in Pittsburgh with Lila Corwin Berman, Maja Gildin Zuckerman, and Jacob Labendz Dec 02, 2018

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Lila Corwin Berman, Maja Gildin Zuckerman, and Jacob Labendz join us for a roundtable discussion about the attacks at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh: how we can try to contextualize, historicize, and respond to it, and to the broader rise of political violence and antisemitism.

The attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh was shocking and horrific. In the days afterwards, we started thinking about how this podcast could serve as a platform for serious discussion about antisemitism, political violence, and our current world in historical perspective. Lila, Maja, and Jacob are all looking at different aspects of antisemitism, American Jewish history, and modern Jewish life in general, so we came together in the hope that we could contribute, through this roundtable, to a wider, ongoing conversation about what’s happening now.

Please note: Normally, new episodes of Jewish History Matters are posted every two weeks. There will also be a regularly-scheduled episode posted on Sunday Dec. 9, after which we will return to our biweekly publishing schedule.

Lila Corwin Berman is the Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History at Temple University, and she directs the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History there. After the shooting in Pittsburgh, Lila published an essay in the Washington Post titled “American Jews always believed the U.S. was exceptional. We were wrong.“

Maja GIldin Zuckerman is a Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford. She’s currently studying Jewish middle school students’ experiences and perception of inclusion and exclusion in the civil sphere today, focusing on how Jewish youth in both Europe and the US react to the general rise of antisemitism and terror.

Jacob Labendz is the Clayman Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Youngstown State University, where he directs the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies. His research focuses on the history of Jews in and from Central Europe after the Holocaust, and on topics related to antisemitism, nationalism, and migration. Jacob has been writing and speaking about the rise of the alt-right in the US and the cultures of extremist right-wing hate, xenophobia, and antisemitism on the internet.

17: Why American Jewish History Matters with Hasia Diner Nov 25, 2018

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Hasia Diner joins us to talk about the big issues that have driven the field of American Jewish history and her work in particular, how we understand American Jewish history in two contexts—in the context of Jewish history as a whole, and within the framework of American history—and also how the field has changed, what lies ahead, and why it matters today.

This episode combines two interviews, the first recorded over the summer of 2018, and a short second conversation following the attack in Pittsburgh in October 2018.gh in October 2018.

Hasia Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at NYU’s Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies.

Some books and topics we discuss today include:

Hasia Diner’s books
Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (2017)
Jeffrey Gurock, ed., Conversations with Colleagues: On Becoming an American Jewish Historian (2018)
“Communalist” and “Dispersionist” Modes of Jewish History
- David Hollinger, “Communalist and Dispersionist Approaches to American Jewish History in an Increasingly Post-Jewish Era,” American Jewish History 95, no. 1 (Mar. 2009): 1–32
- Tony Michels, “Communalist History and Beyond: What is the Potential of American Jewish History?,” American Jewish History 95, no. 1 (Mar. 2009): 61–71
Development of American Jewish History in the 1950s
- Salo Baron, “American Jewish History: Problems and Methods,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 39, no. 3 (1950): 207–266
- Oscar Handlin, “Our Unknown American Jewish Ancestors” (Commentary, 1948)

**16: The Stakes of Jewish History with David N. Myers** Nov 11, 2018
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David N. Myers joins us to talk about his two new books, The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life and Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction, and about why Jewish history matters.

Please note: We recorded this episode over the summer of 2018, obviously prior to the attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. We do talk about antisemitism a lot in this episode—as one of David’s arguments is that historically speaking anti-Jewish sentiment has had a paradoxical, preservative effect on Jewish culture. We just wanted to let listeners know why it doesn’t come up in our conversation when it is clearly a natural and important topic to discuss in this context. There are probably some things we would say differently, maybe even a lot of things, about this issue and other things too, in light of the attack in Pittsburg and the rising antisemitism; indeed, David’s claims about antisemitism are easier to make in a world where it poses a theoretical threat, not a real life one. Nevertheless, we wanted to post the episode as it was originally recorded in the hope that it can contribute to the ongoing conversations about history and the present moment. Indeed, the rising antisemitism, political violence, and coded antisemitic language in American political discourse highlights even further the stakes of Jewish history, and this is something that we’ll explore in a number of episodes. But we wanted to indicate that since we recorded this episode prior to the attack, that’s why it doesn’t come up.

Read the introduction to David N. Myers’ The Stakes of History: “History, Memory, and What Lies Between”
Purchase The Stakes of History on Amazon
Purchase Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction on Amazon

David N. Myers is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History in the UCLA History Department, as well as the director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. In 2017-18, he served as the President/CEO of the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Some figures, books, and topics we discussed include:

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise (specifically ch. 3)
Gerson Cohen, “The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History” (full text)
Simon Rawidowicz, “Israel the Ever-Dying People” in State of Israel, Diaspora, and Jewish Continuity: Essays on the “Ever-Dying People”
David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History
David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto
Tim Snyder, On Tyranny

**15: Colonialism and the Jews with Lisa Moses Leff, Ethan Katz, and Maud Mandel** Oct 28, 2018
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Lisa Moses Leff, Ethan Katz, and Maud Mandel join us discuss Colonialism and the Jews, an edited volume bringing together essays from a 2014 conference on the subject. Listen for our conversation about the place of Jews in the history of colonialism and the role of empire in the varied Jewish experiences of modernity, how examining these topics helps us to rethink modern Jewish history, and the question of Zionism and colonialism.

Purchase Colonialism and the Jews on Amazon

Ethan Katz is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France, and is the coeditor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times.

Lisa Leff is Associate Professor of History at American University. She is the author of Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France and The Archive Thief: THe Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust.

And Maud Mandel is the president of Williams College. She is the author of In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France and Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict.

This volume, Colonialism and the Jews, is the product of a 2014 conference at Brown University which dealt with the subject. It’s great because while there were only so many people who could attend that meeting, it is part of such an important conversation — one which we will be continuing in the episode today. The essays explore colonial history, culture, and thought as they intersect with Jewish studies. Together, they consider what the “Imperial Turn” means for Jewish studies — how changes in the way in which scholars study and consider empires means for the field of Jewish history. Because it is quite important. As Maud, Lisa, and Ethan note in the introduction to the volume, modern Jewish history has often been thought of in terms of the nation-state: the effort to gain the rights of emancipation, to participate in and integrate into the wider culture, and also the effort by Jewish nationalists to attain a state in various forms. However as they argue in the introduction to the book, we need to rethink the nature of the modern Jewish experience, and colonialism provides one potential set of tools to do that. That’s because Jews have often lived in colonial settings, and certainly within empires, and the tools and practices of colonialism have sometimes been used on the Jews even within Europe. If one thinks about Jews in the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires — to name just three of them — we can understand that it is also the imperial framework and not just the western European model of the nation-state which provides a useful frame for understanding modern Jewish history.

The book contains a set of 14 essays that deal with three major issues: Jews as subjects and agents of empire, Jews in colonial politics, and the issue of Zionism and colonialism. Altogether, it presents an important contribution to the study of Jews in the modern era and a great point of departure for what I’m sure will be a great conversation about why colonialism matters for Jewish history, and why the Jewish case helps us understand colonialism and empire as a whole.

**14: Cafes and Modern Jewish Culture with Shachar Pinsker** Oct 14, 2018
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Shachar Pinsker discusses his book A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture and the ways in which cafes provide a window into understanding modern Jewish culture and modernity: What it means for cafes to be sites of the production of Jewish culture, how cafes sold not just coffee but also a concept of modernity, and the transformation of cafes and Jewish culture.

Read the introduction to A Rich Brew: Cafes and Modern Jewish Culture
Follow Shachar Pinsker on Twitter at @spinsker

Shachar Pinsker is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan, and his research focuses on Hebrew, Jewish and Israeli literature and culture, and this book follows his 2010 monograph “Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe.”

A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture takes us on a tour of Jewish cafe culture in six cities: Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv. In the course of the book, we see how Jews who migrated to cities gravitated towards cafes as important spaces and sites for producing Jewish culture. It’s a story of the global aspects of Jewish modernity, what it means to be part of the public sphere, and the ways in which cafes present an important backdrop to the changes and challenges of modernity.

Some of the items, topics, and figures we talked about in this episode:

Third Place (or third space)

Starbucks’ “Third Place” policy

Shachar Pinsker, “The social space of the coffeehouse, and who is ‘welcome’ there” (NYU Press Blog, May 2018)

Cafes

Cafe Kassit (Tel Aviv)

“Cafe Society,” Ha’aretz (May 2010)

Cafe Ziemiańska (Warsaw)

Tłomackie 13 (Warsaw)

Romanisches Café (Berlin) – see photos (in German)

Cafe Europa (New York)

Garden Cafeteria (New York)

Writers

S. Y. Agnon

Sholem Aleichem

Mendele Mocher Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitsh)

Aharon Appelfeld

Chaver Paver (Gershon Einbinder)

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Novels and Films

Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (1902)

The Pianist (2002)

Michael Idov, Ground Up: A Novel (2009)

Cafe Nagler (2016)

**13: A German Jewish Cookbook with Sonya Gropman and Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman** Sep 30, 2018
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Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman and Sonya Gropman talk about The German Jewish Cookbook: Recipes and History of a Cuisine, the ties between German and Jewish culture,what it means to document the everyday German Jewish experience and its food, and why it still matters.

Purchase The German Jewish Cookbook on Amazon

Gabrielle Gropman is a visual artist and mediation professional who was born in Germany in 1938 and emigrated to the US in 1939. Her art has been exhibited throughout the US as well as in Germany. A multimedia art installation about the history of her Germa Jewish family was exhibited at the Villa Dessauer municipal museum in the town of her birth, Bomberg Germany in 1991, and again in 2013 and 2014.

Sonya Gropman, her daughter, is a painter, photographer, and writer whose work has been exhibited and published in the US. She’s involved in local sustainable agriculture in NYC.

Together, this mother-daughter team have produced the cookbook and also coauthor the website GermanJewishCuisine.com, where they publish original material about German Jewish food and culture.

Their cookbook highlights that there was, and still is, a German Jewish cuisine. It has some fantastic recipes, but even more than that, looking at food can help us think through the relationship between German and Jewish culture and the meaning of the German Jewish experience. Also, it highlights the heritage and history of those who fled from Nazi Germany and brought with them among other things the memory of the culture and food that Sonya and Gabby have sought to preserve and document in this book.

**12: Food and Power with Nir Avieli** Sep 16, 2018
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Nir Avieli discusses his recent book Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel, and why food matters for understanding contemporary Israel: Who lays claim to “owning” various foods and cuisines, what it means to fight over food, and the relationship of food, culture, and power.

Read the introduction to Food and Power: “The Hummus Wars”
Purchase Food and Power on Amazon

Nir Avieli is Associate Professor at Ben Gurion University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is a cultural anthropologist interested mainly in food and in tourism.

Food and Power a fascinating and exciting exploration of the foodways of contemporary Israelis. As he argues, what we eat is something that we do not always think about deeply, but there is a great deal to unpack. In the course of the book, we see how Israeli Jews construct their identity through food as well as negotiate their relationship with populations like the native Palestinian Arab population, Europe, and migrant workers. On the whole, he argues that there is a close relationship between the ways in which Israeli Jews consume and create food, and the ambivalent relationship with power in Israeli and Jewish history.

Some other books and topics discussed in this episode:

Miri Regev’s Culture War (NYT, Oct. 2016)
Janet Siskind, “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality.” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 2 (1992): 167–191.
The “hummus wars”

“Give Chickpeas A Chance: Why Hummus Unites, And Divides, The Mideast” (NPR Morning Edition, July 2016)

Matthew Shaer, “The Politics of Hummus” (New York Magazine, Mar. 2012)

Yotam Ottolenghi, Jerusalem

Ronit Vered, “Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi Talk Jerusalem, Recipes and Passports” (Haaretz, Dec. 2013)

Season 2 Preview Aug 19, 2018

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Listen to a preview of what’s coming up in Season 2 of Jewish History Matters, with themes and topics on a broad range of issues in Jewish studies and why it matters. (Some clips have been edited for length.)

Season 2 of Jewish History Matters begins in September 2018 and episodes will be posted every two weeks.

Some topics and issues coming this season include:

A New History of Hasidism with David Biale
Food and Power with Nir Avieli
The German Jewish Cookbook with Sonya Gropman and Gabrielle Rossmer Gropman
Cafes and Modern Jewish Culture with Shachar Pinsker
Colonialism and the Jews with Lisa Moses Leff, Ethan Katz, and Maud Mandel
The Stakes of Jewish History with David N. Myers
Why American Jewish History Matters with Hasia Diner
Going Beyond “Chrismukkah” with Samira Mehta
American Jewish Settlers in Israel with Sara Yael Hirschhorn
Jews and Human Rights with James Loeffler
Masculinity and American Jewish History with Sarah Imhoff and Lindsay King
Holocaust Testimony and the Digital Age with Jeffrey Shandler
Pedagogy and Jewish Studies with Jenny Caplan

Reflecting on Why Jewish History Matters with Jason Lustig and Moses Lapin Jun 03, 2018

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After the first ten episodes, we’re taking a hiatus over the summer and will be back in August. Our host Jason Lustig is joined by Moses Lapin to look back on the first ten episodes, look forward towards what’s next, and reflect on why “Jewish History Matters” matters.

Moses Lapin is a PhD student in the Department of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

**10: The Jewish Bible as a Material Object with David Stern** May 20, 2018
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David Stern joins the podcast to discuss his book The Jewish Bible: A Material History and the meaning of the history of the Jewish Bible as a material object: How the Bible has served as a symbol, how its form has stood in for struggles over ownership of the Bible, what this all tells us about the relationship between Jews and the world in which they lived, and ultimately what the future of digitization holds in store for the Bible.

Purchase The Jewish Bible: A Material History at Amazon
Read the introduction to The Jewish Bible: A Material History

David Stern is the Harry Starr Professor of Classical and Modern Hebrew and Jewish Literature at Harvard University, and he serves as the director of the Center for Jewish Studies there.

Links to books, articles, and other topics discussed in the episode:

Editions of the Bible

Septuagint (Greek)

Vulgate (Latin)

Glossia Ordinaria

Rabbinic Bible (1520s)

David Stern, “The Rabbinic Bible in Its Sixteenth-Century Context,” in The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy

Masorah and Masoretes

The Masorah of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia

Aleppo Codex and Leningrad Codex

History of print and the “print revolution”

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe

Roger Chartier, ed., The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe

Digitization of Jewish texts

Sefaria

Accordance Bible Software

Haggadot.com – digitization and producing a personalized Passover Haggadah

Museum of the Bible

The Jewish Bible: A Material History traces the history of the Bible as an object. That’s to say, instead of focusing on the content, meaning, and history of the text, David is interested in it as an physical, material, designed object and as a symbol. In the course of his book, we follow the Bible as a scroll in ancient times, as a manuscript codex and in the age of the printing press, and into modern times. In this, David shows how Jews adopted the scroll as the form of the Torah but that this object which was somewhat ordinary in ancient times became a ritual one with a particular Jewish identity. Looking to the middle ages, Jews produced the Masorah codices which mirrored the efforts of early Islam to codify and perfect the Quranic text, as well as which show the contests among Jews for which version of the Biblical text would become the standard. And the question of the Bible’s form—as a codex vs. as a scroll—was part of a complex struggle between Jews and Christians over who could claim the Bible’s legacy. Looking to the age of print, David talks about the Rabbinic bible—which is not to say all Bibles associated with Rabbinic judaism, but a specific bible printed by Daniel Bomberg in 1516 and then again in 1524 in Venice which would become the basis for the study bibles—and how print radically transformed how people read the Bible. Finally, he discusses how the Bible has become a cultural object rather than a religious one in more recent times, though many of the older forms – whether we look to the image of the scroll itself, or to the specific codices of the Masoretes like the Aleppo Codex—have become important symbols.

It’s such a rich and exciting topic. It’s part of a wider move towards the history of the book and an interest in material culture. And in terms of the Jews: if Jews are a “people of the book,” the book that’s being referred to there is the Bible. But, the Bible hasn’t always been a “book” in the way we think of it today. Whether it’s a scroll, or a codex, or a digital copy, or something else—and how it is designed and constructed—tells us a great deal. And as objects which people put tremendous time and effort into producing, and which were heavily regulated, they were also highly contested.

The Bible’s physical form matters because even more than the text itself, things like the Torah scroll present powerful symbols of Judaism and Jewish culture and tradition. And the way in which it has changed over time indicates the broader shift in Jewish culture: Because the Bible itself, as a text which had liturgical and legal meaning, and especially the material objects—scrolls, codices, and so on—all this cuts across the entire chronology and geography of Jewish history. Looking at them closely allows us to understand the transformations of Jewish culture, the relationship between Jews and their host cultures, and the struggle over claiming the Bible to be a Jewish object and text when other cultures, especially Christianity, made competing claims against it.

8: Jewish Community Studies with Matthew Boxer Apr 22, 2018

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Matthew Boxer joins us to talk about contemporary American Jewish communities, why gathering population data matters, what we can learn from these kinds of studies, and how examining a range of communities from across the U.S. helps us to understand the varieties of American Jewish life between smaller and larger communities. We discuss how community studies are put to practical use, how it relates to trends in Big Data and quantification, and how all this contributes to our broad understanding of American Jewry and the American Jewish experience.

Read about the community studies conducted by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies:

Community Studies homepage
Recent studies conducted
Janet Krasner Aronson, Matthew Boxer, and Leonard Saxe, “‘All Politics is Local’: Challenges in the Study of Local Jewish Communities,” Contemporary Jewry 36 (2016): 361–380
Other Cohen Center and SSRI projects
- American Jewish Population Project
- Birthright Israel studies

Other important Jewish community and population studies:

Other major figures, topics, and books discussed:

Pierre Bourdieu
- Sociology is a Martial Art, 2002 collection of Bourdieu’s essays
Ferdinand Tönnies
- Tönnies, “Society and Community“
- Originally in German, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887)
- On Tönnies: Arthur Mitzman, “Tönnies and German Society, 1887–1914: From Cultural Pessimism to Celebration of the Volksgemeinschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1971): 507–524
- Also: Robert Thomas Schechtman, “Community and Utopia: The Discourse of Gemeinschaft and the Search for a New Modernity in Germany” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California–Berkeley, 2008)
Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century
Jacob Rader Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (1990)

Matt Boxer is an assistant research scientist at Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute based there, and he also teaches at Brandeis’ Hornstein Jewish professional leadership program. His research focuses on local and national Jewish population studies, and he will soon finish the manuscript for his first book, which will examine the effects of local Jewish Community size on Jewish identity. The Cohen Center is a multidisciplinary research institute focused on the study of contemporary Jewish life. They and the SSRI oversee a series of studies, among them the local Jewish Community surveys we’ll discuss today. These studies provide estimates on the size and character of Jewish communities all over the US, helping the communities to understand the wants needs and interests of the people they serve to develop strategic plans as systematic assessments of resource allocation for programs and services. Recent studies include Collier County, Florida, Nashville, Pittsburgh Seattle and elsewhere.

The Cohen Center also is the home for other research projects like the American Jewish population project, which aims to determine a population map of American Jewry and then also manages the assessment of the Birthright Israel program. Today Matt and I are going to focus on these communities studies that Matt and his team have been developing what we can learn from them and also the question of Jewish life in smaller communities.

7: How Benjamin Netanyahu Enables Antisemitism with Joshua Shanes Apr 08, 2018

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Joshua Shanes joins us to discuss his article, published in the Washington Post in February 2018, “How Benjamin Netanyahu Enables Antisemitism.” We talk about antisemitism today, why it’s particularly important right now, the relationship between antisemitism, Zionism, and Jewish politics, and also the role historians have to play in speaking about this and other issues.

Joshua Shanes is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston. His research focuses on Central and East European Jewry in the 19th and 20th centuries, specifically turn-of-the-century Galicia and the rise of Zionism as a counter-movement to the traditional Jewish establishment.

Read Joshua Shanes’ article, “How Benjamin Netanyahu Enables Antisemitism” (Feb. 26, 2018, The Washington Post)
See other essays in the Washington Post series, “Made By History”
- Doug Rossinow, “The dark roots of AIPAC, ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’” (Mar. 6, 2018, The Washington Post)

Other essays, books, and topics discussed:

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Relationship with Antisemitism
- Gershom Gorenberg, “Why did Netanyahu wait so long to condemn anti-Semitism in Charlottesville?” (August 2017)
- The Economist, “Binyamin Netanyahu is soft on anti-Semitism when it suits him” (August 2017)
- Chemi Shalev, “Zeroing in on Soros, Netanyahu Stands Shoulder to Shoulder With anti-Semitic Scum” (Feb. 2018, Ha’aretz)
Yair Netanyahu’s Antisemitic Meme
- The Guardian, “Netanyahu’s son Yair draws fire after posting ‘antisemitic cartoon’” (Sept. 2017)
- Ha’aretz, “Soros and Reptilians Controlling the World: Yair Netanyahu Posts Meme Rife With anti-Semitic Themes” (Sept. 2017)
Anti-Defamation League, “Anti-Semitic Incidents Surged Nearly 60% in 2017“
Wayne Lapierre’s 2018 CPAC Speech
- View Wayne Lapierre’s remarks
- Andrew Silow-Carroll, “Why Wayne LaPierre’s CPAC speech freaked out Jews and heartened anti-Semites” (JTA)
- Sophia Tesfaye, “NRA’s Wayne LaPierre instructs CPAC to “be frightened” of “socialist wave” following Parkland” (Salon)
South Carolina H. 3643 (2017-18), “Anti-Semitism”
FPO, Freedom Party of Austria
- The Guardian, “Europe Rallies Against [Jörg] Haider Coalition” (2000)
- Ha’aretz, “Right-wing Israeli Lawmaker Meets Member of Austrian Party With Nazi Roots” (Dec. 2018)
Etgar Keret, “I’m Not Anti-Israel, I’m Ambi-Israel” (June 2016, New York Times)
Recent scholarly discussions of fascism
- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
- Sean Illing, “Historian Timothy Snyder: Trump’s lies are creeping tyranny” (May 2017, Vox)
- Christopher Browning’s discussion with Vox, “Comparing the alt-right to Nazism may be hyperbolic — but it’s not ridiculous” (Dec. 2016)
Tom Nicholas, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
- Nicholas’ article in The Federalist

6: Jewish Migration with Mia Spiro and Scott Ury Mar 25, 2018

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Mia Spiro and Scott Ury join us to discuss a new issue of East European Jewish Affairs dedicated to the topic of Jewish migration which they edited alongside Semion Goldin. In this episode, we talk about why studying the history of Jewish migration matters, how new approaches might help revise some commonly-held beliefs about modern Jewish life and culture, perhaps unsettling ideas about the role of antisemitism and crisis as leading factors in Jewish history. And further, we’ll talk about how the cases of Jewish migration, especially those highlighted in this journal issue, help to illuminate the broader history of migration and what it tells us about the present.

Mia Spiro is lecturer in Jewish Studies at the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, and she is the author of Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction. Scott Ury is senior lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Jewish History where he’s also the director of the Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism. He is the author of Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry.

**5: Why 1938 Matters Today with Frank Mecklenburg** Mar 11, 2018
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Frank Mecklenburg joins us to talk about the Leo Baeck Institute‘s 1938Projekt (1938 Project), an exciting initiative to track the experience of German Jews in 1938 on a day-by-day basis. We talk about the project and its objectives, what kind of history it tells us about the transformations over the course of 1938, and about the importance of learning from the past: How we can comprehend daily life under the Nazi regime, how such “normalcy” illustrates how authoritarian regimes consolidate their power and marginalize elements of the population, and how we can identify parallels between the past and today’s international crises of refugees and discrimination against minorities and immigrants. The LBI’s 1938Projekt, by posting one item each day that relates to what happened on the exact day eighty years ago, illustrates the past and also presents a demand for us to think about what’s happening today too.

Check out the 1938 Project:

LBI’s 1938Projekt (auch auf Deutsch)
1938Projekt on Twitter and on Facebook
January 1, 1938: Mutual Aid for the Dispossessed — The Jewish Winter Relief Organization

Other historical events, topics, and figures discussed:

Chronology of major events in 1938
Kindertransport
Leo Baeck Institute

LBI Memoir Collection

Center for Jewish History
Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil”

Also see: Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

On the concept of a “lachrymose history” of the Jews, read: Yitzchak Schwartz, “An Anti-Anti-Lachrymose Approach to Jewish history?” (JHI Blog, Feb. 2017)

**4: What Ifs of Jewish History with Gavriel Rosenfeld** Feb 25, 2018
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Gavriel Rosenfeld joins us talk to discuss What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism, counterfactual history, and the role that history, truth, and fiction play in the public sphere.

Purchase What Ifs of Jewish History
Read the introduction to What Ifs of Jewish History

Other counterfactual books (both scholarly and popular), TV shows, and movies discussed:

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2005)
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007)
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (2011) and the Hulu TV show (2016)
Robert Harris, Fatherland (1992) and the HBO movie (1994)
Ben Winters, Underground Airlines (2016)
Richard Ned Lubow, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I (2014)
Cyril M. Kornbluth, “Two Dooms” (1958), in His Share of Glory
HBO’s proposed (and scrapped) show, “Confederate”

‘Game of Thrones’ Creators Land New Series at HBO (Variety)

The Producers of HBO’s Confederate Respond to the Backlash and Explain Why They Wanted to Tell This Story (Vulture)

Sean O’Neil, “Can we just stop fantasizing about the South winning the Civil War?” (AV Club)

Bree Newsome, “We don’t need a TV show about the Confederacy winning. In many ways, it did.” (Washington Post)

Gavriel Rosenfeld, “In Defense of HBO’s Counterfactual ‘Confederate,'” The Conversation, Sept. 2017

“Why HBO’s Planned ‘Confederate’ Series Alarms Some Historians”

Scholarly works

Peter J. Bowler, Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World Without Darwin (2013)

Jeffrey Gurock, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938–1967 (2015)

Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (2010)

What would America be like without immigrants? Counterfactual history and debates about immigration

Paul Krugman, “Know-Nothings for the 21st Century,” NYT, Jan. 2018

Bret Stephens, “A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews,” NYT, Jan. 2018

Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Bret Stephens Counterfactually Channels Hugo Bettauer: America Without Jews,” Counterfactual History Review, Jan. 2018

Relevant books and ideas mentioned about the question of Jewish historians and counterfactual history:

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor (1982)
David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Historians and the Zionist Return to History (1995)
Wissenschaft des Judentums

Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891)

Other theoretical issues relating to debates about history and narrative:

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (1973) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1990)
Robert Bernasconi on Jacques Derrida’s concept of supplementarity

**3: Houston Jewish History Archive with Joshua Furman** Feb 11, 2018
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Joshua Furman joins us to discuss the Houston Jewish History Archive and how this effort to preserve the history of Houston’s Jewish community after Hurricane Harvey brings together the strands of American Jewish history and the challenges posed by human-caused climate change, how we try to preserve the past against the tide of a changing world and adapt in order to create sustainable lives and communities.
Joshua Furman at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, Houston, 2017. Photo credit: Michael Duke
Read about the Houston Jewish History Archive:

Houston Jewish History Archive on Facebook
Press release: Rice Launches One-of-a-Kind Houston Jewish History Archive in Fondren Library
American Libraries Magazine on the impact of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma on libraries and archives

Other archives, initiatives, and ideas discussed:

Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (Cincinnati)
American Jewish Historical Society (New York City)
Center for Jewish History (New York City)
Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston
Leo Baeck Institute (New York City) and DigiBaeck
On climate change and history: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197-222
Community-based archives

Andrew Flinn, “Independent Community Archives and Community-Generated Content: ‘Writing, Saving and Sharing our Histories,’” Convergence 16, no. 1 (2010)

Andrew Flinn, “Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions,” InterActions 7, no. 2 (2011)

Michelle Caswell, “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for Identity-Based Community Archives,” in Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada (2014, Litwin Books), pp. 35–52

Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, “’To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 56–81

Steven Weitzman, The Origin of the Jews — **2: Jewish Origins with Steven Weitzman** Jan 28, 2018
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Steven Weitzman joins us to talk about his book The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, and what the question of Jewish origins has to tell us about a range of issues including nationalism, the relationship between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and the ways the study of the past has often been put to use for political or ideological purposes.

Purchase the book on Amazon
Read the introduction to The Origin of the Jews

Other books, articles, and figures discussed:

Criticism of the mythic origins of nations and modern nationalism

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People

Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe

Also read: The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm,‎ Terence Ranger

Also read: Israel Bartal, “Inventing an Invention” (Haaretz, Jun. 2008)

Documentary Hypothesis

Benedict Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (new translation edited by Jonathan Israel)

Read Spinoza, TPT, ch. 7 “On the interpretation of Scripture”

Julius Wellhausen and the Documentary Hypothesis

Abraham Geiger

Also read: Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus

Why Jewish History Matters Jan 15, 2018

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Jewish history is a world history, spanning three thousand years and nearly every continent and country. It’s the tale of a diverse people that have survived and thrived no matter where they ended up, a story of globalization long before the modern world.

And it’s a history of minorities that illustrates both persecution and perseverance. In the end, Jewish history is more than the history of the Jews themselves—it’s the history of the world in which they have lived, of the ideas they have generated, of the cultures and religions which have existed in a constant pull of interaction, hybridity, and borrowing.

This podcast is dedicated to exploring why the Jews’ history is important, and how the newest research and enduring issues of Jewish studies have something to offer to our understanding of the world at large. It presents the argument that in order to understand history and the human experience broadly speaking, we need to understand the Jews. Looking to American history, European history, the histories of colonialism, science, or philosophy, let alone other topics, we cannot overlook the Jews both as people who played a part in it as well as an important example of the place of minorities in these societies and histories. To disregard the Jews would be to neglect the nuances and complexities of history.

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