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.

Jewish History Matters

73: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union with Eliyana Adler

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.

72: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging with Alma Heckman

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?

71: Streaming the Holocaust with Marat Grinberg

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.

70: Dancing and Jewish Modernity with Sonia Gollance

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.

69: American Judaism Beyond the Synagogue with Rachel B. Gross

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.

68: The Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century with Adam Teller

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.

67: Is a Two State Solution Possible in Israel/Palestine? Considering the Paradigms of the Conflict with Ian Lustick

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. 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.

66: The Hitler Haggadah with Jonnie Schnytzer

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.

65: Waste Siege: Infrastructure and the Environment in Israel/Palestine with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

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.

64: A Hebrew Infusion: Hebrew at American Jewish Summer Camps with Sharon Avni, Sarah Bunin Benor, and Jonathan Krasner

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.

63: The Scholems: Considering German Jewry’s History and Legacy with Jay Geller

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).

62: The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex with Lila Corwin Berman

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.

61: The Blood Libel Accusation with Magda Teter

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.

60: The Cairo Genizah with Marina Rustow

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.

59: Latino Jews and the Diversity of American Jewish Life with Laura Limonic

Explores why Jewish history matters through in-depth discussions of new research, current topics, and enduring debates about Jewish history and culture.

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