Jewish History 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 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 was recently published in a second, revised edition. Listen in for a wide-ranging conversation about American Jewish history at large, 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. Among other things, we discuss the ties between Yiddish language podcasting and Jewish camping, which is the focus of Sandy's research. She recently published an article in American Jewish History on these issues of post-Holocaust Yiddish culture titled "'Laboratories of Yiddishkayt': Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps and the Transformation of Yiddishism," which we also will discuss in the episode.

In this episode we're excited to share a presentation by Shayna Weiss about Israeli TV titled "Black is the New Black: Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Israel, and the Globalization of Television," and a conversation with her about Israeli television, the representation of ultra-Orthodox Jews in this medium, and why this matters as we put Israel in a global context.

Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine join us to discuss the Jewish Annotated New Testament: what it means to have a “Jewish” version of the NT, how we can effectively understand the NT within its historical and social context, and why all this matters in terms of scholarly developments as well as the relationship between Judaism and Christianity today.

For this episode, we are joined by Robert Alter to discuss his monumental translation of the Bible. Robert Alter has been translating the Bible for more than twenty years, beginning with his translation of Genesis published in 1996. It’s really a tremendous achievement, as he brings his own particular sensibilities to the project as a literary scholar. We're excited to share our fascinating conversation about the meaning of translation, the significance of Bible translations in particular, and what we get from a translation of the Bible that emphasizes its literary character and sensibilities.

Mirjam Thulin and Jeffrey Blutinger join us for a conversation about the past and future of modern Jewish studies. We'll look at what’s at stake when in how people write and tell the history of the Jews, and delve into why studying the Jews has mattered over the course of two centuries of modern Jewish studies, and why it still matters today.

Listen to a roundtable discussion on the materiality of Jewish culture with B Buncic, David Sclar, Nathan Mastnjack, and Jason Lustig, who in 2018-19 have been Harry Starr Fellows in Judaica at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies. The theme this year has been the history of the Jewish book, and we come together to discuss why books matter in Jewish culture and why we should look at the material objects, writing platforms, and physical form in addition to the contents that they contain.

Simon Rabinovitch joins us to talk about Israel's nation-state law and his volume "Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy and the Law."

What would it mean to create a society with income equality? This is a burning political and social question today as we look at our world where fewer and fewer people hold a larger and larger part of the economic pie. But it's also something that we can look to Jewish history to try to understand, so we are joined in this episode by Ran Abramitzky to discuss his book The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World which explores how and why kibbutzim developed in Palestine and Israel and the relationship between income equality in kibbutzim with economic models like free riders, adverse selection, and the brain drain. Listen to our conversation about how kibbutzim created a social framework that allowed them to maintain a measure of income equality, if only for a time, and what that tells us about the possibilities for income equality in our own age. As Ran argues, income equality is possible—but it doesn't come for free.

Listen to a roundtable discussion about pedagogy and public engagement from the December 2018 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston, where Lori Lefkovitz, Sara Wolkenfeld, Matt Williams, and Jason Lustig,

Steve Ross joins us to talk about his book "Hitler in Los Angeles" and the history of fascist and pro-Nazi groups in LA, the real threat that fascism posed in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and what it teaches us, unfortunately, about our present moment.