Jewish History Matters

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.