Jewish History Matters

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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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