Jewish History Matters

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**Jewish History Matters**

Explores why Jewish history matters through in-depth discussions of new research, current topics, and enduring debates about Jewish history and culture.

Latest Episodes:

**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.

Purchase The Scholems on Amazon

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.

Purchase The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex
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.

Purchase A Rainbow Thread

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.

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