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:

**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: