Jewish History Matters

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.

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.

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,

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 SpiegalmanJenny 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.

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.”

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?

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 PressPurchase 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.

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 BaeckPurchase 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.

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.

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.

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.

Eliana 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.

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.

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?

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 AmazonRead 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.

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. Purchase Beyond the SynagogueRead 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 Eldrich 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 Study of American Jews identified about 20% of “Jews of no religion” (or "religious nones"). Beyond the Synagogue asks us to rethink what is religion in American Jewish life and how it is that Jews who aren’t affiliated with institutionalized religious life still access and interact with Judaism in a myriad of ways.

Adam Teller joins us to speak about the seventeenth-century Jewish refugee crisis following the 1648 Khmenlytsky pogroms—how it helps us to understand the transnational transformation of Jewish life in early modern times, as well as when we want to think deeply about refugee issues on a wider scale, something which is of course still relevant today. Adam Teller is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Brown University. Adam has written widely on the economic, social, and cultural history of the Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. His most recent book, Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which is the starting point for our conversation today, was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, and it was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ComplexRead 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).

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.

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.

Laura Limonic talks about how Latin American Jews help us understand the diversity of American Jewish life, both in terms of the history of Jews throughout the western hemisphere as well as the changing face of Jewish life in the United States. Laura Limonic is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Old Westbury of the State University of New York. Her research is in the area of contemporary immigration to the United States and the integration trajectories of ethnic and ethno-religious groups. Her book Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States explores issues of ethnicity, race, class and religious community building among Latino Jewish immigrants in Boston, New York, Miami and Southern California. Kugel and Frijoles was also awarded the 2020 Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Book Award.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 AmazonRead an excerpt from the introduction to The Implicated SubjectRead 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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rachel Harris joins us to talk about her recent volume Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which brings together almost forty scholars who are teaching about Israeli and about the Arab-Israeli conflict in a range of institutions and settings to talk about how we teach about this conflict and why it matters.

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

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Sarna discusses American Judaism: A History, which recently was published in a second, revised edition. Listen in for a wide ranging conversation about American Jewish history in big terms, about Jonathan's work at large and the book American Judaism in particular. As we discuss in the episode, American Judaism is one of a series of books which have been published in recent years that has tried to synthesize American Jewish history, so we will look closely at how the landscape of American Jewish historical studies has developed, how we tell the history of America's Jews, and why it matters.

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.