Frankely Judaic: Explorations in Jewish Studies

In this episode, Frankel fellow Oren Yirmiya explores how Hebrew writers have grappled with the gendered structure of Hebrew, exploring ways to express non-gendered or gender-fluid characters and concepts that work within and beyond conventional Hebrew.

In this episode, cultural historian and literary scholar Golan Moskowitz discusses his current book project, which explores the cultural history of Jewish drag and its relationship with Jewish identity in America. Through detailed analysis of significant figures such as Adah Isaacs Mencken, Flawless Sabrina, Harvey Fierstein, Charles Busch, Sadie Sadie the Rabbi Lady, and Sasha Velour, Moskowitz highlights how Jewishness and drag have intertwined to challenge social norms and reflect shifting cultural and political climates. He also delves into the concept of 'transcreativity' and how Jewish drag performers have contributed to broader American drag culture, emphasizing the importance of recognizing queer, trans, and non-binary Jews in the art of drag.

In this captivating episode, host Jeremy Shere from Connversa speaks with Marce Gutierrez, a research fellow at the National University of Salta in Argentina. Marce shares her unique perspective as a trans woman and an anthropologist, studying the interconnected histories of Jewish and LGBTQ+ persecution in Argentina. She delves into the story of Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a key figure during Argentina's turbulent 20th century, and how the violent legacy against marginalized groups spans from the early 1900s through the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Marce also discusses her research into archives that reveal the struggles and resilience of these communities, highlighting the need for recognition and reparations, and reflecting on the power of community connections in overcoming historical injustice.

In this episode, we explore the work of Raphael Rachel Neis, a professor of ancient history at the University of Michigan, whose book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, delves into ancient rabbinic understandings of reproduction and identity, focusing on how the rabbis of the Talmud viewed the emergence of new life. The book aims to reveal a more complex, varied, and open ancient world, countering the traditional Judeo-Christian perspectives on family, reproduction, and identity.

In this episode, historian Dr. Anna Hejkova from the University of Warwick explores rarely discussed queer histories and enforced relationships during the Holocaust. The narrative delves into the lives of concentration camp guard Anneliese Kohlmann; Helene Sommer, a female prisoner who Kohlmann forced into a relationship; Margot Heumann, a teenage prisoner who witnessed the relationship; and Willie Brachmann, a kapo in Auschwitz. Shedding light on the complex dynamics, power imbalances, and survival strategies within labor and concentration camps, these individual stories reveal how prisoners navigated their dire circumstances, using appearance and sexuality for survival, while also acquiescing to relationships with guards. Reflecting on societal attitudes, moral complexities, and post-war ramifications, this episode provides a nuanced understanding of human resilience, solidarity, and the multifaceted nature of historical memory.

In this episode, Debora Kantor, a lecturer at the National University of San Martin, Buenos Aires, discusses her research on the representation of Jews and Jewishness in Argentine modern and contemporary cinema. She delves into her specific project on Argentine nonfiction films about Israel, examining how these films reflect both collective and personal understandings of Jewish identity. The discussion includes her analysis of autobiographical turns in contemporary Argentine cinema and the transformation of Jewish portrayals in this context. Cantor highlights significant films and directors, illustrating how they address themes such as the imagination of Israel, the intergenerational transmission of the Holocaust, and the depiction of Jewish spaces in Buenos Aires. She provides detailed insights into specific films like Nicolás Abruj's 'Us, Them and Me', Ivo Eichenbaum's 'The Automatic Part', and Flora Resnick's 'Peromaisk', among others, elaborating on their thematic exploration of political utopia, left-wing melancholia, and the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Jewish diasporic identity. The music used in this episode, "Moisesville", by Argentine Jewish musician Jevel Katz, is the name of one of the most important Jewish agricultural colonies settled by the Jewish Colonization Association in Argentina and his music is very relevant to the cultural heritage of Argentine Jews.

In this episode, we explore the fascinating history of the Jewish Museum in New York City. From its humble beginnings in 1904 as a small collection of ceremonial objects to its current status as a renowned institution grappling with questions of identity and purpose, the museum's story is one of constant evolution and debate. We discuss the museum's origins and early years, including the significant contributions of Cyrus Adler and the impact of the Holocaust on its collection. We delve into the mid-20th century, when the museum gained a reputation for showcasing avant-garde art, sometimes sparking controversy within the Jewish community. We examine the museum's shifting focus over the decades, from Jewish cultural history to contemporary art and back again. We hear from artist and scholar Jeff Abt, author of "Too Jewish or Not Jewish Enough: Ritual Objects and Avant-Garde Art at the Jewish Museum of New York," who shares his insights on the museum's ongoing struggle to define its mission. Join us as we explore the complex and captivating story of the Jewish Museum, a reflection of the ever-evolving American Jewish experience.

The history of European fashion typically focuses on singular, Christian European geniuses who conjured bold designs and created cutting-edge garments. But in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa played important roles in shaping European tastes in fashion. In this episode, Devi Mays, an associate professor of Judaic Studies and history at the University of Michigan, and Julia Phillips Cohen, an associate professor of Jewish Studies and history at Vanderbilt University, tell the story of the rise and fall of the Babanis, an Ottoman Jewish family with origins in Istanbul, Tunis, and Algiers, who built a fashion house that counted scored of prominent celebrities and socialites among its clients

From Gold Mountain to Tinseltown: Ethnic Identity in California's Architectural Vernacular It's well known that millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe immigrated across the Atlantic to the United States, settling mostly in New York and other large cities. But some Jewish immigrants crossed the Pacific and settled on the West Coast of the United States, in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. In this episode, we explore the research of Zoya Blumberg-Kraus, an independent scholar and fellow at the Frankle Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, which looks at how West Coast Jewish communities used architecture to express their identities as both fully American while also retaining vestiges of their Jewish origins.

Jews are no strangers to horror. They've encountered and dealt with horrifying events throughout their history - exile, destruction of two temples, expulsion, blood libels, ghettoization, genocide, terrorism. The list goes on and on. And so, it's perhaps not surprising that Jewish critics and filmmakers have done some really interesting work in the horror film genre, creating what scholar Adam Lowenstein refers to as Jewish horror, although what that term means, exactly, is complicated. In this episode. Lowenstein, a professor of English and film and media studies at the University of Pittsburgh, guides us through the history of Jewish horror films, from The Golem in 1920 to the present day, exploring how Jewish (and sometimes non-Jewish) filmmakers have used film to investigate questions around what it means to be human, and the dark forces within us that, when unleashed can lead to dehumanization and horror.

The rise of the Nazis and their antisemitic agenda during the early 1930s was the beginning of the darkest era of modern Jewish history. For obvious reasons, we tend to not make jokes about it. And yet, at the time, some Jewish writers and artists, including photographers, did exactly that. In this episode, Louis Kaplan, a professor of visual studies and art history at the University of Toronto, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the lives and work of four Jewish photographers–Roman Vishniac, Erwin Blumfeld, Grete Stern, and John Heartfield–who use visual wit, irony, and satire to create photos that resisted and satirized the antisemitic bluster and menace of the Nazi regime.

2023-24 Frankel Institute "Jewish Visual Cultures" Today's Guest: Deborah Dash Moore Project Title: “Camera as Passport” During the 1930s, ‘40, and ‘50s, throughout the great depression and into the post-WWII era, photographers who were members of the NY Photo League, many of whom were Jews, documented working-class street life in New York City. And without quite realizing it at the time, they pioneered a new form of photography. In this episode, University of Michigan historian and Jewish Studies scholar Deborah Dash Moore tells the stories of these photographers, whom she chronicled in her latest book, Walker in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Mid-century New York. The episode contains rich descriptions of photographs by Sol Libsohn, Dan Weiner, N.J. Jaffee, and other prominent Jewish members of the New York Photo League, whose self-imposed mission was to capture and ennoble the lives of working-class New Yorkers. The 2023-24 Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, led by co-head fellows Deborah Dash Moore and Richard I. Cohen includes twelve scholars from four countries who are exploring various aspects of Jewish visual imagination. This exploration encompasses different periods and regions of the world and touches on interactions among the written word, sound, and image.

Since the earliest years of the modern state of Israel, Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, known as Mizrahim, have had to fight for equal rights and opportunities. Mizrahi Jews were looked down upon by the Zionist establishment as primitive–in many ways the very opposite of the image of the New, Western-style Jew that the establishment hoped to foster. And so, Mizrahi activists have for decades struggled to be recognized as full and equal members of Israeli society. But often lost among the larger struggle are the voices and experiences of Mizrahi women, who fought not only for Mizrahi rights but also for the rights of Mizrahi women to prosper and determine the course of their own lives. This episode of Frankely Judaic features Yali Hashash, a social historian and head of the gender and criminology program at Or Yehuda College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Hashash's book, Whose Daughter Are You? Ways of Speaking Mizrahi Feminism, explores the lives of Mizrahi women throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and culture as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Like most Jews living in Muslim lands, the Jews of Algeria had over the centuries built a vibrant culture, with homegrown traditions, institutions, and religious practices. Tying it all together was the Algerian Jewish community's unique dialect of Judeo-Arabic, which rendered Arabic in Hebrew script–much like Yiddish, a German dialect written in Hebrew, spoken by Jews of Eastern Europe. For centuries, the Algerian dialect of Judeo-Arabic was spoken and written by Jews as an everyday language, and also had some liturgical function. But starting around the 1860s, Judeo-Arabic began to be used by Jews throughout the Muslim world for writing and commenting about the modern world of ideas and politics. In this episode of Frankely Judaic, historian Avner Ofrath, a lecturer in modern history at the University of Bremen, in Germany, and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, explores the rise and fall of Judeo-Arabic political writing, delving into what drove the phenomenon, the impact it had on Algerian-Jewish life and culture, and why it matters today. The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

Mizrahiyut, or Mizrahi identity and consciousness, is an Israeli phenomenon, born in the decades after hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab and North African lands immigrated to Israel. But recently, a version of Mizrahi identity has taken root in the United States among the sons and daughters of Mizrahi Jews who have relocated to America. In this episode of Frankely Judaic, scholar and Frankel Institute fellow Gal Levy discussed this burgeoning of Mizrahi identity in the US, exploring how and why it developed and what it means for the evolution of Jewish identity in America. The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fledgling State of Israel scrambled to accommodate a flood of Jewish immigrants from war-torn Europe and from the Middle East and North Africa. The Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who came to be known as Mizrahi, or Eastern, Jews, were seen as backwards and primitive by the Zionist establishment. Two events exemplify this attitude: the Yemenite Childrens Affair, wherein the children of Yemenite Jewish families were taken by Israeli hospitals for treatment, and when their families inquired after them, were told that they'd died; and the Ringworm Affair, which subjected thousands of Mizrahi immigrants to multiple radiation doses as a treatment for the fungal skin infection ringworm–a treatment that raised the risk for cancer and other diseases. In this episode, legal scholar Inbal Blau, a legal scholar and assistant professor at the Ono Academic College in Israel, and a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, examines how tort law has enabled the victims of these affairs to gain a measure of compensation, and questions to what extent monetary compensation can help right past wrongs, known in legal scholarship as “transitional justice.” The 2022-2023 fellowship year at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, "Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity," includes scholars from the United States and Israel who explore Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) society and cultural as an interdisciplinary and intersectional field of study.

2022-23 Frankel Institute Mizrahim and the Politics of Ethnicity Erez Tzfadia Project Title: Mizrahim and the Local Politics of Ethnicity in Development Towns

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Catherine Bonesho Project Title: Gentile Rulers in the Early Jewish Imagination

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge Diversity Fellow, Rodney Caruthers Project Title: Judaism and its Practice Beyond Rivers

2021-2022 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Alexei Sivertsev "Construction of Jewish Identities in 2nd Temple Period"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Liane Feldman Project Title: The Myth of Cultic Centralization in Second Temple Judaism

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity M Tong Line 3: Project Title: "Circumcision and Bodily Discourse"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Oren Ableman Project Title: Resistance to Rome in Second Temple Literature

2021-2022 Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Gregg E. Gardner Project Title: "Digging Up Judaism: Archaeology, Diversity, and Material Religion in the 2nd Temple Era"

2021-22 Frankel Institute Second Temple Judaism: The Challenge of Diversity Fellow, Mark Leuchter Project Title: So Let It Be Written: Persian Imperial Myth and the Formation of Early Jewish Textual Identity

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Lucia Finotto Project Title: Republic of Scholars: Jewish Translators in Medieval Sicily

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Maya Barzilai Project Title: Love and the Zionist Translation Project

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alex Moshkin Project Title: Russian-Israeli Poetry

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Oren Kosansky Project Title: Jews, Alcohol, and Moroccan Mahia

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Roni Masel Project Title: How Jews Became Modern Readers

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Alessandro Guetta Project Title: "A Common Tongue": Jewish Translation from Hebrew in Early Modern Italy

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Anita Norich Project Title: Yiddish Women Writers

2020-21 Frankel Institute Translating Jewish Cultures Fellow, Naomi Seidman Project Title: Freud's Jewish Languages

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Julian Levinson Project Title: Flames from the Earth

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Hannah Pollin-Galay Project Title: Khurbn Yiddish: How the Holocaust Changed the Yiddish Language

2019-2020 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Harriet Murav Project Title: "Yiddish Literature of Abandonment"

2019-2020 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Yaakov Herskovitz Project Title: Self-Translation and the Nation

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Nick Underwood Project Title: Yiddish Paris after the Holocaust

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Saul Zaritt Project Title: "Of Trash and Translation: Rethinking Popular Yiddish Fiction"

2019-20 Frankel Institute Yiddish Matters Fellow, Eli Rosenblatt Project Title: Black Phrase, Yiddish Gaze: Translating America in Eastern Europe

2019-20 Frankel Institute "Yiddish Matters" Fellow, Eve Jochnowitz Project Title: Yiddish Reactions to Modern Food

2018-19 Frankel Institute: "Sephardic Identites: Medieval and Early Modern" Fellow, Monica Colominas Aparicio Project Title: Muslim Understandings of Sephardic Exceptionalism in Christian Iberia

2018-19 Frankel Institute Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern Fellow, Moshe Yagur Project Title: Inter-religious Families in Medieval Egypt

2018-19 Frankel Institute Sephardic Identities, Medieval and Early Modern Fellow, Marc Herman Project Title: The Oral Torah in an Islamic Key

2018-19 Frankel Institute Sephardic Identities, Medieval and Early Modern Head Fellow, Ryan Szpiech Project Title: He is Still Israel? Conversion and Sephardic Identity before and after 1391

2018-19 Frankel Institute Sephardic Identities: Medieval and Early Modern Fellow, S. J. Pearce Project Title: In the Taifa Kingdoms: The Medieval Poetics of Modern Nationalism

2018-19 Frankel Institute Sephardic Identities, Medieval and Early Modern Fellow, Ross Brann Project Title: Andalusi and Sefardi Exceptionalism

2017-2018 Frankel Institute Jews and the Material in Antiquity Megan Nutzman Project Title: "Asclepius and Elijah: Ritual Healing in Roman and Late Antique Palestine"

2017-2018 Frankel Institute Jews and the Material in Antiquity Chaya Halberstam Project Title: "Justice and Mercy Revisited: A Religious-Legal History of Judicial Impartiality"

2017-2018 Frankel Institute Jews and the Material in Antiquity Rick Bonnie Project Title: Material Religion in Hasmonean-Roman Judaea: The Role of the Senses, Space, and Climate in Determining the Use of Synagogues and Miqva’ot

2017-2018 Frankel Institute Jews and the Material in Antiquity Deborah Forger Project Title: God’s embodiment in Jewish Antiquity