Jewish History Matters
Explores why Jewish history matters through in-depth discussions of new research, current topics, and enduring debates about Jewish history and culture.
Episodes
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 ...
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April 4, 2022 • 64 mins
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...
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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 clai...
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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 cultura...
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February 15, 2022 • 77 mins
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, ...
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February 2, 2022 • 69 mins
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 au...
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January 18, 2022 • 67 mins
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 Profe...
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January 2, 2022 • 73 mins
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.
Re...
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November 28, 2021 • 60 mins
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 dispers...
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November 14, 2021 • 69 mins
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 the...
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October 31, 2021 • 70 mins
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.
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October 10, 2021 • 58 mins
Eliyana 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: th...
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September 19, 2021 • 64 mins
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.
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September 5, 2021 • 61 mins
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.”
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May 23, 2021 • 58 mins
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.
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May 9, 2021 • 62 mins
Rachel B. Gross talks about nostalgia and lived religion in American Jewish life, which is the focus of her book Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice. 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 Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side, through genealogy, through children’s books and dolls, and ...
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April 25, 2021 • 56 mins
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. ...
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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 So...
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March 24, 2021 • 47 mins
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 a...
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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.
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