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Embracing Ambiguity: How History Matters
A Conversation with Lonnie G. Bunch, III (Smithsonian Institution) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (POLIN Museum), moderated by Alice Greenwald (National September 11 Memorial & Museum)
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Why Racism Should Matter for Jewish Studies Scholars
Barbara Harris Combs (Clark Atlanta University), Jonathan K. Crane (Emory University), Joe Feagin (Texas A&M University), Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut), and Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College)
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Imperfect Panacea? American Jewish Education and the Response to Crisis
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People of the Helping Friendly Book: Jews, Judaism, and Phish
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Visioning New Worlds and Recalling the Old World in Queer Yiddish Drag and Burlesque
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Breach of Protocols: Revisiting Zion's Elders (An Academic Performance)
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Prayer and Crime: an Introduction to the Cantorial "Golden Age"
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The Marshall Sklare Award Session: A Half Century (1970–2020) of the Social Scientific Study of Jewry: Two Views on the Past, Present, and Future
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Uses and Abuses of Art in Representations of Holocaust Violence
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Marking Seventy Years of the 1950 Blaustein–Ben Gurion "Understanding"
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Blood Libel: An Old Accusation, New Approaches
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Exploring New Terrain in the Landscape of Twentieth Century Black–Jewish Relations
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Teaching about Antisemitism
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Jews in the Middle Eastern City: An Interdisciplinary Conversation
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#MeToo and the American Jewish Community
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A Conversation with Lonnie G. Bunch, III (Smithsonian Institution) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (POLIN Museum), moderated by Alice Greenwald (National September 11 Memorial & Museum)
In this session, three individuals instrumental in the creation of major museums that have opened within the past seven years – each commemorating, documenting and conveying traumatic history where there are conflicting notions of what the story is (or should be) – will discuss the challenges and opportunities of building institutions of public history that tackle contested topics in fraught contemporary contexts.
All museums communicate complex information to wide audiences and are considered among the most highly trusted institutions in their role as centers of informal education grounded in scholarship and historical documentation. As containers of cultural production, museums also promote and reinforce a narrative of national identity. But what happens when there are differing notions of what national identity is? How do museums – and particularly though not exclusively history museums – navigate the expectations of their stakeholders, the politics of history, and the obligation to crystallize complicated human stories into coherent narratives that are historically accurate, broadly accessible, and able to evolve as our understanding of history evolves?
Historian, author, curator, and educator Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex.
Alice M. Greenwald is President & CEO of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, where from 2006-2016, she served as Executive Vice President for Exhibitions, Collections, and Education and Director of the Museum.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor Emerita and Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
Barbara Harris Combs (Clark Atlanta University), Jonathan K. Crane (Emory University), Joe Feagin (Texas A&M University), Lewis R. Gordon (University of Connecticut), and Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College)
This plenary addresses how anti-racism efforts can shape Jewish studies pedagogy and research; considers the potential impact of Black Lives Matter on Jewish Studies; and explores the ways in which new research on the intersection of race, gender, and nation informs Jewish studies research and teaching.
Barbara Harris Combs is associate professor of sociology at Clark Atlanta University and a visiting fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University.
Jonathan K. Crane is the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar of Bioethics and Jewish Thought at Emory University’s Center for Ethics.
Joe Feagin is Distinguished Professor and Ella C. McFadden Professor in sociology at Texas A&M University.
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.
Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College
Jessica Dressin (Repair the World), Mike Greenhaus (Relix Magazine), Oren Kroll-Zeldin (University of San Francisco), Joshua Ladon (Shalom Hartman Institute), and Ariella Werden-Greenfield (Temple University), with moderator Shaina Judith Hammerman (Stanford University)
Over most of four decades, the rock band Phish has developed a diehard following that includes a significant Jewish fan base. Jews, Judaism, and Jewish identity have an intriguing relationship with the band, their music, and the Phish community more generally. Even beyond their performance of Jewish songs such as “Avenu Malkenu” and “Yerushalaim Shel Zahav,” there are numerous elements of the musical, communal, and sometimes transcendental world of Phish that can be interpreted as potently Jewish or examined through a Jewish framework. The goal of this roundtable is to consider some of the ways that Phish can be seen, listened to, experienced, and analyzed Jewishly in order to elucidate the myriad ways Jews perform their identities in non-traditional contexts.
Jodi Eichler-Levine (Lehigh University), Sandra Fox (Stanford University), Jonathan Krasner (Brandeis University), and Laura Yares (Michigan State University), with moderator Ari Y. Kelman (Stanford Graduate School of Education)
This session will explore the following intertwined questions:
● To what extent have American Jewish educational and cultural agendas been shaped by a crisis mentality?
● How have educators and cultural transmitters read and misread perceived crises in American Jewish life? How have they understood the nature of these crises?
● How have their interventions both responded to and reshaped communal priorities for the future?
● What kinds of social and communal problems was Jewish education supposed to fix?
● How do educational interventions create their own crises?
Yael Horowitz and Chloe Li Piazza (UC Berkeley), with respondent Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago), and chair Julia Havard
This session will include two live performances of queer and trans Yiddish drag and burlesque, “Longing and Yearning for a New Jewish Future through Yiddish Burlesque” by Yael Horowitz and “Zisl Khaloymes Presents: Performing the Queer Yiddish Archive” by Chloe Li Piazza. In the times of COVID-19, a resurgence of fascist and reactionary political regimes, and the virtualizing of the most basic aspects of communal life, these performances explore what tools exist in Ashkenazi pasts to guide us through uncharted futures. How do Yiddish creative traditions combined with queer cultural and activist legacies foster the embodied coexistence of joy and rage as antifascist methodologies? In harkening back to antifascist Yiddish performance traditions, we are invited to ground in these aesthetics of resistance, uncovering new potentialities of old forms imbued with the values of queer liberation and trans justice, and vision an antifascist queer future using inherited ancestral wisdom.
Alanna Esther Cooper (Case Western Reserve University), Irit Dekel (Indiana University), Stanley Mirvis (Arizona State University), and Daniel Stein Kokin, with moderator Paul Frederick Lerner (University of Southern California)
This academic performance explores the genesis, contents, and reception of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. More deeply, it interrogates and subverts this notorious forgery to probe aspects of Jewish identity and engagement with the larger world, in essence posing the question: What would it look like to transform the Protocols into an authentically Jewish text?
At once irreverant and informative, Breach of Protocols is also timely: 2020 marks the centenary of the Protocols publication in English, the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism attests to the continued presence of its toxic allegations, while the rise of QAnon demonstrates the enduring appeal and influence of conspiracy theories.
Jeremiah Daniel Lockwood (Stanford University) and Yoel M. Kohn (Cantor), with respondent Gabriella Safran (Stanford University), and chair Judah M. Cohen (Indiana University)
The term cantorial "Golden Age" draws to mind a discrete body of work recorded by a well-known cadre of Eastern European cantors working in Europe and America in the 1900s–1930s; however, this “Golden Age” of recorded cantorial music did not come about without pushback and controversy. In this presentation, scholar and musician Jeremiah Lockwood will offer insights from the YIVO archival holdings that illuminate the impassioned debates among cantors and their critics in the early twentieth century. He will be joined by Cantor Yoel Kohn, one of the leading young voices reviving Golden Age cantorial music, who will sing representative works from classic records.
Sponsored by Association for Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ)
Arnold Dashefsky (University of Connecticut) and Chaim I. Waxman (Rutgers University and Hadassah Academic College), with co-chair and moderator Judit Bokser Liwerant (UNAM) and co-chair Leonard Saxe (Brandeis University)
This session includes two presentations on the process of knowledge-building in Jewish Studies over the past fifty years, delivered by Chaim I. Waxman and Arnold Dashefsky, the 2020 Marshall Sklare Award winners, selected for their sustained and meaningful contributions to the social scientific study of Jewry.
Rachel Feldhay Brenner (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Batya Brutin (Beit Berl Academic College), and Teryl L. Dobbs (University of Wisconsin-Madison), with respondent Rosemary Horowitz (Appalachian State University), and chair Michlean Lowy Amir (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
The adage “when the guns roar, the muses fall silent” does not reflect adequately the reality of the Holocaust violence which was not limited the physical annihilation of the Jewish victims. The scheme of the Final Solution aimed also at the dehumanization of the victims; it intended to destroy the victims’ dignity, beliefs, and identity. Distorted forms of art were called on to disfigure the victims, disparage their cultural heritage, and reaffirm their moral repulsiveness. Such use of art in the process of dehumanization violated not only the victims’ sense of humanity; it violated art itself, stripping it from its humanistic value. This panel shows the diverse role of visual arts, music, and literature in a) the documentation of the abuse, b) the contribution to the process of dehumanization, and c) the production of the story of continuing degradation.
Natan Aridan (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), Miriam Sanua Dalin (Florida Atlantic University), Theodore Sasson (Mandel Foundation), with chair Ilan Troen (Brandeis University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
The panel contributes to a deeper perspective of the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein "understanding" in August 1950, the repercussions of which are still pertinent today in research on the changing nature of American Jewish–Israel relations. The "understanding" was motivated not only to dispel the notion that Israel spoke on behalf the Jewish people, but also, to alleviate US reservations regarding Israel’s foreign policy orientation at the onset of the Korean War, which affected potential US Government loans to Israel and fears that it would hamper charitable philanthropic efforts for Israel. Despite the "understanding" American Jewish leaders exasperated that their protestations at Israeli leaders’ antagonistic statements regarding their ‘exilic’ existence continued unabated. This gave rise in 1961 to Blaustein soliciting Ben-Gurion’s reassurance that the 1950 "understanding" still had validity as far as Ben-Gurion and the Israel Government in relation to matters which had been covered by the "understanding" and had been contradicted. Ben-Gurion was lambasted by his own Cabinet and members of Knesset for not having cleared the statement within the Government prior to its issuance. The lingering rancor demonstrated the dissonance relating to Israel’s paternalistic policy towards American Jewry.
Elissa Bemporad (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), Edward Berenson (New York University), Hillel J Kieval (Washington University in St. Louis), and Magda Teter (Fordham University), with moderator Jason Lustig (University of Texas at Austin)
This session will feature the discussion of four new books that explore the persistence and permutation of the blood libel accusation in different geopolitical contexts and time periods. More specifically, Magda Teter, Hillel Kieval, Elissa Bemporad and Edward Berenson will discuss some aspects of their new scholarship on ritual murder in the contexts of East and Central Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
Marc Dollinger (San Francisco State University), Cheryl Greenberg (Trinity College), and Lauren B. Strauss (American University), with chair and respondent Shana Bernstein (Northwestern University)
The relationship between American Jews and African-Americans is the most significant—and certainly the most examined—area of Jewish interaction with a primarily non-Jewish group in mid-twentieth-century America. Its heroes, conflicts, and visual symbols are central not only to the narrative of a particular time and place, but to the ongoing construction of Jewish identity in many secular and religiously liberal circles. This session, however, focuses on new scholarship, which questions some previous assumptions and shifts the emphasis of this vital area of research.
Michael Brenner (American University), Pamela S. Nadell (American University), Paola Tartakoff (Rutgers University), and Britt P Tevis (Yale University), with moderator Rebecca Amy Kobrin (Columbia University)
Challenged by the rising antisemitism of our current moment, the speakers all developed new courses on antisemitism this past year. This roundtable examines their experiences teaching about antisemitism in the university and considers the questions: How is antisemitism defined? How do we negotiate the politics underlying the course and the politics of our contemporary moment? What guided our choices of teaching materials out of the many options? How did our particular academic specialties determine the structure of each course? What surprised us about teaching the course?
Michelle Campos (The Pennsylvania State University), Dina Danon (Binghamton University), Brahim El Guabli, Deborah Starr (Cornell University), and Alon Tam (Columbia University), with moderator Nancy E. Berg (Washington University)
This roundtable explores Jewish experiences in the Middle Eastern city and wrestles with three interconnected sets of questions:
1) Lived Spaces and Place-Making: What role did Jews play in the Middle Eastern city, as consumers, urban citizens, and performers on the public stage? What kinds of physical and/or conceptual boundaries were erected, shifted, or erased between Middle Eastern Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, and around Jewish and non-Jewish spaces?
2) Memory and Representations: How has the presence of Jews been represented in historical and cultural accounts of the Middle Eastern city? Conversely, how has the absence of Jews featured in the literature of and about Middle Eastern cities? What do memory, nostalgia, and loss tell us about historical Jewish urban experiences, and what do they newly create?
3) Sources and Methods: What underutilized or new sources can contribute to understanding the Middle Eastern Jewish urban experience? What kinds of methodological opportunities or challenges do these sources offer?
H. Susannah Heschel (Dartmouth College), Deborah Dash Moore (University of Michigan), and Rafael Medoff (The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies), with moderator Keren R. McGinity (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University)
The rise of the #MeToo movement poses unique and important challenges to the American Jewish community. Recent controversies involving high-profile individuals in our community who were accused of sexual misdeeds raise urgent questions concerning gender equity in the Jewish community; problems involved in enforcing standards in a voluntary community; the responsibilities of the Jewish news media; and the role of philanthropists in influencing Jewish organizational policymaking. This roundtable will address these and related issues.
