Jewish History Matters

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 Yor

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. Th

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: Rabbi

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

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’

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

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

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

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 th

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 Amazon

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