News
Gershom Gorenberg, Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism, published his latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East. Join us for a book conversation between Gershom and Samuel G. Freedman in May.
In addition, he recently wrote two articles for The Washington Post:
On Monday, February 1, Tina Frühauf gave a presentation on her latest book Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, And The Jewish Community In Germany, 1945-1989.
By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. In this book talk, author Tina Frühauf provides a glimpse into the rich kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust, followed by a discussion with Michelle Chesner, Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, on the newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections.
Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. The study of Jewish music in modernity has been her primary research focus for two decades, culminating in monographs from Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur (Georg Olms Verlag, 2005) to Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021). Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions is Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American Musicological Society, and the collection of essays, Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts (Boydell Press, 2020). Her current work focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the twentieth century and the conditions of globalization, genocide, exile, and minority experience.
Purchase the book and save 30% on Transcending Dystopia [global.oup.com] and enter the code AAFLYG6 at the checkout.
Last week, Dr. Rebekka Grossmann gave a wonderful lecture on Zionist politics and photography. Throughout the existence of the Palestine Mandate photography was considered a prime means to draw global attention to the Zionist presence in the Middle East. Photographers' insights into Zionist building activities were produced and disseminated in large numbers. The ways the different photographers and image agents staged these views according to their own imaginations of the Jewish presence in Palestine, however, have found little consideration in historical research. This talk approaches local and international discussions on the nature of Jewish statehood through the photographer’s lens to challenge the assumption that the production of Zionist visual arts merely corroborated the political ideology of the Labor Zionist establishment. It places particular emphasis on the mobile nature of photographic communication thereby offering insights into neglected nuances of Zionist political thought in a highly transnational decade.
This lecture is part of the Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture series supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and conducted in partnership with Fordham University's Jewish Studies program. Please join us for additional New Voices lectures this spring.
Rebekka Grossmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on the intersections of Jewish political history, migratory mobility, and global visual culture. Before joining the Franz Rosenzweig Center she was a Tandem Fellow at the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has also been supported by the George L. Mosse Program in History, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her dissertation, which is currently transformed into a book manuscript, discusses photography as a space of formulations of concepts of national belonging in Jewish migratory history. Aspects of this research have been published for example in Jewish Social Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook.
Solomon Mengesha is an M.A. Candidate in Jewish Studies.
1- How did you get involved with Jewish Studies?
While working with the formerly incarcerated, I decided to continue my education and enrolled in graduate school, where I earned a M.A. in public administration (MPA). After that, I went to work for various private and non-profit organizations. However, in the back of my mind, I remembered two things about my late father. He used to call me Dr. Solomon for as long as I can remember and expected that I, one day, become a Doctor, which did not happen in his lifetime as he died in 2001. Second, I used to see my father, whom we called Abbe which is Amharic for father, listening to the AM/FM radio for information about Israel. I did not know why then, but before he died in 2001, I realized how much Israel and the Jewish people meant to him. He never got to see Israel but left me with his passion for Israel and the Jewish people. Now I'm seeking to do the things he wanted to do for himself but could not do in his lifetime. This is what led me to enroll in the Jewish Studies M.A. program at Columbia and research the Betha Israelis, in particular. In this regard, Dr. Isabelle Levy (M.A. Program Director), has been a great mentor and superb guide who is gentle yet challenged me to do better throughout my studies on Ethiopian Jews. I was also lucky to have studied with Dr. Debra Glasberg Gail last Spring in the Jews, Magic, and Science course, where I fell in love with the work of Isaac Luria, a leading rabbi and Jewish mystic of the 16th century. This course exposed me to Jewish poets, physicians, astronomers, rabbis, and thought leaders in Jewish history, including Maimonides.
2- What are you currently researching and working on?
As part of my M.A., I am currently researching Betha Israel (Ethiopian Jews) material culture. As an outgrowth of my studies, I incorporated a non-profit organization named Our Story (Yegna Tariq in Amharic), which seeks to build bridges to share information in real-time through relevant data mining and evaluation, education, cultural interchange, and technology sharing. It aims to help create a local Betha Israel Material Culture Center that houses books, oral tradition, customs, and music.The information will be centered around and embedded within language, faith, education, contact with other communities, and the pursuant survival and development of its unique Jewish identity. Our Story aims to bring policy changes in Israel via public opinion, shaped by data-driven information gained when local communities create space, access resources, and allow other stakeholders to be directly or indirectly involved. I am also co-authoring a book about the Betha Israelis with the help, guidance, and support of Prof. Yehoshua Frenkel of University of Haifa.
3- What are you most looking forward to this Spring?
I am looking forward to traveling to California to see my daughter.
Rebecca Kobrin moderated a panel titled Teaching about Antisemitism (see below) at the annual Association for Jewish Studies conference. She presented a lecture to school educators titled United States, Refugee Policy, And Antisemitism, 1924-1954, as part of the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’s professional development program for teachers. Her articles on anti-Semitism and immigration were published in The Washington Post.
In honor of the tenth anniversary of the Norman E. Alexander Lecture in Jewish Studies, this year's event highlighted the work of scholars doing research in the collections. Dr. J. H. (Yossi) Chajes discussed his work on kabbalistic manuscripts; Dr. Francesco Spagnolo shared music relating to the Jewish community in Corfu; and Alexis Hagadorn described what she discovered in analyzing paint samples and bindings.
J. H. Chajes is the Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of History at the University of Haifa and the Director of the Ilanot Project.
Francesco Spagnolo is the Curator of the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Music at University of California at Berkeley.
Alexis Hagadorn is the Head of Conservation and Preservation at Columbia University Libraries.
Over 180 people joined us for the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellowship Lecture with Dr. Alon Tam. In this lecture, Tam explored the history of different Nostalgias that have been created around the Jewish community in Egypt since its demise in the middle of the 20th century. How have Egyptian Jews remembered and commemorated their lives in Egypt from the places they migrated to? How have the Egyptian state and society remembered and commemorated the Egyptian Jewish community? How have these memories been shaped by different political, social, and cultural interests, agendas, and historical developments? How have these memories changed over time, right until the present?
Additional Resources:
Dr. Tam provided a list of sources to continue to learn about this topic.
Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies also wrote a blog post on a French/Hebrew Siddur that is part of the Fordham archives.
Alon Tam is a social and cultural historian of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, and of that region's Jewish communities. His research interests broadly include urban history, social relations and identities, historical anthropology, culture and politics. Tam received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 with an award-winning dissertation about Cairo’s coffeehouses, while his current research focuses on Jewish social identities in twentieth century Cairo. A recent fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in Philadelphia, Tam presently holds the Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia and Fordham.
In partnership with Fordham University’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Supported by the Rabin and Shvidler families.
In many territories of the Holy Roman Empire, Jews had been obliged to take a special oath during certain interactions between Jews and Christians since the medieval era. The 1484 Nuremberg Jewry Oath was probably the first Jewry Oath ever to be printed, and it became the dominant model for oath formulas until the eighteenth century. This article explores the legal, historical, and social background of the Jewry Oath, and its role in the history of Nuremberg during the transitional period between manuscripts and early printing. The idea for this study was developed by Renate Evers, Jewish Studies M.A. candidate, during the graduate seminar The Jewish Book in the Early Modern World in Fall 2018. Prof. Elisheva Carlebach and Michelle Margolis Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies, co-taught this course which was held weekly in the Rare Book Room.
Alongside working on her dissertation, Keyner iz nit fargesn: Soviet Yiddish Culture and the Holocaust in the Jewish Cold War, Miriam Schultz, a seventh year doctoral student in the Yiddish Program, co-manages the Digital Humanities project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present. The We Refugees Archive focuses on individual micro-histories and the city as a microcosm of refuge and new beginnings in a transhistorical framework. The project grew out of her monograph Der Beginn des Untergangs (Berlin, 2016) which studies one of the very first Jewish historical commissions that documented Nazi crimes in occupied Poland between November 1939 and June 1940/1. Their work was entirely based on the work and knowledge of Polish Jewish refugees who fled the Nazi invasion of Poland to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
Anruo Bao, sixth year Ph.D. candidate in Yiddish Studies, published The State of Yiddish Studies in China. Co-authored with Dr. Yitzhak Lewis (Ph.D. 2016, Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) with a separate translation of A Survey of New Jewish Literature (translated from Chinese to English) in In-Geveb, a digital journal of Yiddish Studies.
Aleksandra Jakubczak, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History completed the manuscript of her first monograph – Poles, Jews and the Myth of Trafficking of Women – published in Polish by Warsaw Academic Presses in April 2020. You can listen to a discussion about her book in conversation with Prof. Rebecca Kobrin and Prof. Małgorzata Mazurek.
On Sunday, November 15, we welcomed over 155 people to the virtual Institute to explore the legacy of Salo Baron. 2020 marks the 90th anniversary of Baron’s arrival at Columbia University and the first chair in Jewish History at any secular university in the United States.
We heard from Bernard Cooperman on Finding the Future in the Jewish Past: Salo Baron at Columbia and Jason Lustig on Salo Baron’s Legacy and the Shaping of Jewish Studies Into the Twenty-First Century. Stay tuned for more on Salo Baron in the coming months.
Bernard Cooperman holds the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History at the University of Maryland where he has served as Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and of the Center for Historical Studies. His research focuses on the history of Jews in Early Modern Italy, on ghettoization, on the development of rabbinic culture in the western Sephardic diaspora, and on the development of Jewish historiography and the concept of anti-Semitism. Recent papers include “Inventing the Jewish People by Periodizing Jewish Time,” to be published in Chronologics: Periodization in a Global Context, ed. Thomas Maissen, Barbara Mittler and Pierre Monnet (Heidelberg: [2020]), “Cultural Pluralism from the Ghetto—What Might It Have Meant?”in Pierre Savy and Alessandro Guetta, eds., Non contrarii ma diversi (Rome: Viella, 2020), and “Defining Deviance, Negotiating Norms. Raphael Meldola in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardi Communities (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Dr. Cooperman is presently at work on a study of Spinoza's attitude towards religious tolerance and a book-length study tentatively titled The Right to Exclude: Jewish Competition, Community, and Self-Government in Early Modern Tuscany.
Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. at the UCLA Department of History, and has also been a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute. His research focuses on the development of Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine in the twentieth century, the topic of his book manuscript in preparation, A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. He also is the creator and host of the Jewish History Matters podcast.
Supported by the Kaye Family.
On Tuesday, November 10, over 130 participants joined the Institute for the Annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture with Miriam Udel.
Every children’s literary tradition is marked by the circumstances of its founding moment. The first decades of the twentieth century marked a period of political upheaval and possibility across the Yiddish-speaking world, which coincided with the increasing centrality accorded to childhood throughout the West. By addressing children directly through a new literature aimed specifically at them, Yiddish cultural leaders forged a novel pathway toward building a modern Jewish nation. How did they imagine a secular yet Jewishly rooted collectivity? How did their vision account for complexities in the emotional lives of children?
Supported by the generosity of the Naomi Foundation.
Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University, where her teaching focuses on Yiddish language, literature, and culture. She holds an AB in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, as well as a PhD in Comparative Literature from the same institution. Her first book, Never Better!: The Modern Jewish Picaresque (University of Michigan Press, 2016) won the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Honey on the Page: An Anthology of Yiddish Children’s Literature appeared in October with New York University Press. She is currently working on a critical study of Yiddish children’s literature and translating Khaver Paver’s Labzik: Stories of a Clever Pup as a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center.
The Annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture provides an opportunity for the public to explore topics of Yiddish language and linguistics, the history of Yiddish, Yiddish children’s literature and education. The lecture is supported by the Naomi Prawer Kadar Foundation, Inc., which is dedicated to reimagining education. The Naomi Foundation champions Yiddish, Naomi’s lifelong passion, as a vibrant, rich, and contemporary language. The Naomi Foundation advances the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings.
Earlier this semester, Michelle Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Jewish Studies librarian led a workshop on utilizing the collection while we continue with remote learning. Chesner has been going into the library to digitize primary sources for students and faculty alike, and as usual, is a tremendous resource for all Columbia affiliates conducting research.
On October 19, Nancy Sinkoff, Professor of Jewish Studies and History and the Academic Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University, discussed her latest book, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life, and as vital link between the European and U.S. diasporas.
Please note the full recording of this event will be on our website until November 16.
On Wednesday, October 7, the Institute hosted a Q&A with writer/director Alon Gur Arye and actor Tsahi Halevi, of the film Mossad!
In this parody of popular Israeli military/spy films, Tsahi Halevi mocks his own tough-guy persona as a clueless Mossad operative who teams up with the CIA to rescue a kidnapped tech billionaire and save... his commander's chance of lighting a torch on Independence Day. This joke-a-minute comedy, inspired by American parody hits like "Airplane!," "The Naked Gun," and "Scary Movie," is the first of its kind by an Israeli filmmaker. (95min)
Please enjoy this hilarious Q&A. The film an be rented here.
Film@IIJS is supported by the Appel and Kaye Families.
How do you welcome students and faculty back to campus when campus is everywhere and nowhere?
That is the challenge facing many college campuses this fall and one that the Institute approached as university plans shifted and we adapted to going solely virtual.
In a normal year, we would welcome students and faculty at a series of events.
Our graduate students and faculty would meet for a welcome back wine and cheese event in our home at 617 Kent Hall to learn about summer research, new findings, and meet adjuncts and new students.
We would welcome new undergraduates at the Academic Resource Fair, a way for students to learn about all of Columbia’s offerings and academic experiences. We would then invite these students and other undergraduates to our Undergraduate Open House where we would serve shakshuka and learn about each student, their interest in Israel and Jewish Studies and their hopes for their undergraduate careers.
So how did we adapt? Like everyone else we Zoomed. From graduate students, we learned about researching in the midst of the pandemic, new ventures, and we welcomed the 2020 Rabin-Shvidler Postdoctoral Fellow, Alon Tam.
And Undergraduates virtually visited the Institute from Kenya, to the Jersey Shore and Morningside Heights. We even had the chance to hear from Michelle Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Jewish Studies Librarian, who will continue to be a resource for all students and faculty as she actively works to make the collection even more accessible for the Columbia community.
As we progress into the semester, it is inspiring to see how faculty and students are adapting and figuring out ways to make university life accessible even when we can’t be physically together.
On Wednesday, September 16, the Institute welcomed Clemence Boulouque, Carl and Bernice Witten Assistant Professor in Jewish and Israel Studies at Columbia University, to discuss her latest book Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism with Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.
Another Modernity is the study of the life and thought of the nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher Elia Benamozegh of Moroccan descent, a prolific writer and transnational thinker who corresponded widely with prominent religious and intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East and whose work and legacy needs to be brought out of its relative - but undeserved - obscurity. This idiosyncratic figure, who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for interreligious engagement, came to influence a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel.
What Benamozegh proposed was unprecedented: that the Jewish tradition presented a solution to the religious crisis of modernity. According to Benamozegh, the defining features of Judaism were universalism, a capacity to foster interreligious engagement, and the political power and mythical allure of its theosophical tradition, Kabbalah—all of which made the Jewish tradition uniquely equipped to assuage the post-Enlightenment tensions between religion and reason. In this book, Clémence Boulouque presents a wide-ranging and nuanced investigation of Benamozegh's published and unpublished work and his continuing legacy, considering his impact on Christian-Jewish dialogue as well as on far-right Christians and right-wing religious Zionists.
Interested in studying Jewish Studies at Columbia? Take a peek into what Prof. Beth Berkowitz and Prof. Clemence Boulouque have planned for Fall 2020.
Prof. Rebecca Kobrin wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post on the present political climate regarding immigration.
Read about Dr. Jessica Kirzane's (Ph.D. Yiddish Studies, 2017) translation of Miriam Karpilove's Diary of a Lonely Girl in Tablet Magazine
Read about Dr. Tina Frühauf’s latest book Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 on Broadway World.
In November 2017, the Institute and Film Division of Columbia's School of the Arts presented a panel discussion on The Graduate.
The panel was moderated by Stuart Weinstock, adjunct film lecturer and coordinator of the Institute’s Israel Film Series, with Maura Spiegel, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back, and Shari Springer Berman, writer and director, American Splendor and Girl Most Likely.
In 2018, the Institute welcomed Eddy Portnoy to deliver the lecture, "Bad Rabbis, Brawlers, Psychics, and Thieves: Sensationalism in the Yiddish Press" at the annual Naomi Prawer Kadar Memorial Lecture. The lecture was presented in partnership with the Naomi Foundation, whose work is to advance the teaching and learning of Yiddish, particularly in academic and scholarly settings. Maya Kadar Kovalsky delivered remarks, and Jeremy Dauber introduced Portnoy at the Faculty House of Columbia University on March 20, 2018.
On July 2, 2020, Rebecca Kobrin, the co-director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, Department of History, Columbia University, gave a talk on the legacy of Emma Lazarus.
We often say that America is a “nation of immigrants,” but its historical experience is more complicated. How did America begin to think of itself in this way? This lecture ponders this question as it examines the life and writings of Emma Lazarus to offer new perspectives on the role Jews, and in particular one Jewish woman played in crafting this image. Emma Lazarus has much to teach us about the intersection of American history, Jewish history, and women's history, as she shows the ways in which the powerful words crafted by a member of a small minority group could reshape a national debate and how this vast nation saw its mission in the world.
Please note, below is the video played at the 46 minute mark.
The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies is dedicated to the academic study and discussion of Israel and Jewish Studies. Committed to blending rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge teaching and intellectual opportunities, the IIJS explores the best that’s been thought and said in the field and examines the length and breadth of Jewish history and culture.
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