Jewish Studies Commons^™

January 2019, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Tu B'Shavat; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; MLK Day; Announcements; Dr.Elcha Buckman Happiness and Humor; Community Notices

Neuman, Tamara. Settling Hebron. Jewish Fundamentalism In A Palestinian City. Philadelphia, Pa: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2018., Ilana Maymind

Religious Studies Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Tamara Neuman's Settling Hebron. Jewish Fundamentalism in a Palestinian City.

The Americanization Of The Holocaust: Reconsidered Through Judaic Studies, Brie Green-Rebackoff

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This article explores how the Americanization of the Holocaust is in part responsible for the paradigm that the mention of the Holocaust is vital for a Jewish writer of postwar fiction to be taken seriously. In keeping with the need for people to find meaning in catastrophe, to derive humanity from inhumanity and order out of chaos, Jewish literature's apparent 'success' or international reach often depends on reflecting on the Holocaust as an empowering movement that pushed survivors and other Jews to feel a sense of unity and inclusiveness. By using the Holocaust to generate interest in audiences as opposed …

‘Pa-Jew-Cah’: Reclaiming The History Of Paducah’S Jewish Community, Hannah Newberry

Posters-at-the-Capitol Presentations

When imagining Kentucky’s religious heritage, most people picture churches, not synagogues. Yet historian Lee Shai Weissbach demonstrates that Kentucky’s first synagogue was built in Louisville in 1849, and Jews had been living in the Commonwealth almost as long as it existed. Kentucky’s Jewish heritage is rich and varied as illustrated by Arwen Donahue’s This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak, Deborah Weiner’s Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History, and Amy Shevitz’s Jewish Communities on the Ohio River: A History. While each of these texts refers to Paducah as an early and important Jewish settlement, none offers exclusive …

Colonial Identity In The Jedaniah "Archive" At Elephantine, Lisa J. Cleath

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

This study will consider the materiality of the Jedaniah collection from Elephantine through the lenses of process theory of identity and temporal-spatial discourse. The Jedaniah collection is composed of ten Aramaic documents, spanning at least twenty years in the mid-fifth century BCE. The documents include copies of letters sent and received by members inside of the “Jewish” community as well as Persian-backed authority figures. Since these texts were discovered in 1907, many scholars have discussed their content in relation to their “Jewish” themes, but few have questioned the theoretical frameworks employed for examining the material nature of the documents. A …

On Writing And Righting History: The Stakes Of Holocaust Interpretation And Remembrance In Poland And The United States, Noa Gutow-Ellis

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the ways in which American Jews - and Americans more generally, by way of the Americanization of the Holocaust - have come to think about and understand Poland and how Poland has subsequently rejected their narratives. Historically, American Jewish cultural works have placed Poland as a geographic space, nation, and people at the center of stories of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and World War II. In its quest to right and correct historical misunderstandings, this project looks at the ways Poland has worked to completely revise the historical narrative.

Through tracing historiographies of separateness between Jewish …

Louisville Jewish Hospital’S “Tikkun Olam”: A Case Example Of Continuity For American Jewish Hospitals, Hannah Thompson

Libraries Award for Undergraduate Scholarship

According to Mary Wagner, the author of Jewish Hospitals Yesterday and Today, Jewish Hospitals emerged in the mid-19th century in the U.S. for several reasons: the Jewish American community’s need to combat anti-Semitism, to provide services for its large and then-growing immigrant population, and to establish a place for Jewish medical professionals to work, since anti-Semitism prevented them from being employed elsewhere. Although, American Jews became increasingly more accepted as part of the broader American social and political milieu throughout the early 20th century, Jewish Hospitals persisted in cities across the U.S. until the 1970s. To date roughly 22 …

In Spite Of You, We Live On: A Commemorative Painting, Goldie Gross

Publications and Research

This painting is the product of a Yiddish language independent study with Professor Debra Caplan. It depicts a war portrait of Hitler with a stumbling stone inscribed with the words "אויף צו להכעיס דיר לעבן מיר נאך" (in spite of you, we live on) in the center of his face. It is accompanied by an explanation of the painting.

Introduction: Connecting Histories: Jews And Their Others In Early Modern Europe, Francesca Bregoli

Publications and Research

Introduction to edited volume Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe (ed. by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman)

Introduction To Unlikely Heroes: The Place Of Holocaust Rescuers In Research And Teaching, Ari Kohen, Gerald Steinacher

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

The aim of this collection is not to provide an all-encompassing work about "rescuers" or the phenomenon of rescue. The topic is too large to cover exhaustively, of course, but doing so is also not our aim. We use a few examples in this volume to illustrate research findings and teaching techniques related to Holocaust rescuers in order to show the issues at stake. We open with some new research on the phenomenon of rescue and resistance during the Holocaust.

Gothic Identity And The ‘Othering’ Of Jews In Seventh-Century Spain, Erica Buchberger

History Faculty Publications

In 589, Reccared, king of the Visigoths in Spain, converted from Arian to Catholic Christianity. Arianism was banned, and after a brief period which saw the repression of rebellions, eliminated from the kingdom. All Goths were required to become Catholic. This watershed in Visigothic history both necessitated and facilitated a renegotiation of the parameters of Gothic identity. The entire kingdom was affected: the ruling Visigoths, the small population of recently conquered Sueves, and the Hispano-Romans who were left under the rule of the Goths when the Western Roman Empire fell apart.^[1] This Roman population also included some Jews. While …

A Newcomer's Guide To Kabbalah, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Kabbalah is a mystical and highly spiritual form of Judaism. Popularized by its endorsement by high-profile celebrities like Madonna, the average layperson knows enough about Kabbalah to recognize it as a vaguely familiar term, but not much else. This article strives to serve as an entry-point for both an intellectual and a popular audience to help familiarize readers with core components of Kabbalah and to help to begin fostering an appreciation for this very sophisticated faith. Matters of history, philosophy, science, doctrine, and more pertaining to Kabbalah will be discussed in this article

December 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Mega-Chanukah Party; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book group; Anouncements; Community Notices

“To Defend The Citadel Of Its Faith From All Assaults": Hermann Adler And The London Society For Promoting Christianity Amongst The Jews, Robert H. Ellison

English Faculty Research

This article employs sermons as a lens through which to examine Jewish-Christian relations in Victorian England. It focuses primarily upon discourses preached by clergy affiliated with the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, and on rebuttals delivered by Hermann Adler, a London rabbi who would go on to become Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. Attention is also given to reviews of Adler's work, and to responses to those reviews. These reviews and reviews-of-reviews are evidence that there was an active conversation taking place in the pulpit and the press; the article seeks to show that preaching is …

November 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shab-bates; From the Rabbi; President's Message, Maine State Museum Tour; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

Lessons From The Treblinka Archive: Transnational Collections And Their Implications For Historical Research, Chad S.A. Gibbs

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In work for his 1979 book The Death Camp Treblinka, Alexander Donat began the process of locating survivors of the camp and recording their histories. In a telling testament to the lethality of this place, he could identify only sixty-eight survivors. Analysis of Donat’s early findings—emerging six years prior to the publication of any major academic monograph on the subject—offers a window into the difficulties of conducting research on this Nazi extermination camp and its widely-scattered witnesses.

Treblinka’s disembarkation ramp was effectively the eye of a transnational needle through which so many passed and so few emerged. Victims of …

October 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shabbat in the Woods; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

Online Archive Of The Jewish Chronicle, Robert H. Ellison, Larry Sheret

English Faculty Research

The Jewish Chronicle (JC), a weekly newspaper based in London, England, offers free access to the text and video content on its website and subscription-based access to its full-text archive, which dates back to its founding in 1841. The search interface and the OCR underlying the page scans can be problematic at times, but this is nonetheless a valuable resource; over 175 years’ worth of material on Jewish history and the larger social culture will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields.

September 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Erev Rosh Hashanah Sacred Music Concert; Simchat Torah; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Community Notices

The Merchants At The Casino: Sephardic Elites And Leisure Time In Eighteenth-Century Livorno, Francesca Bregoli

Publications and Research

In 1712,a casino was established in the Jewish neighborhood of the Mediterranean port of Livorno. This venue, which stayed open until 1720, appears unique, as no similar Jewish institutions have been described in comparable communities. This explores the significance of the casino for the relationship of Livornese Jewry with Tuscan culture and the state by investigating internal documents from the Livornese Jewish community (nazione ebrea) in light of analogous Tuscan institutions. By considering an episode in the relatively little studied history of early modern Jewish leisure, we gain insight into values and aspirations of members of one of …

The Biblical Space And Jewish Identity, Pnina Arad

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The earliest known Jewish pictorial map of Eretz Israel is a woodcut that shows the Exodus and the wanderings of the Israelites into Canaan (the only known copy is preserved in the Zentralbibliothek in Zürich). A long text in Hebrew that is written on the map's right-hand side gives evidence to its production in Mantua in ca. 1560. The title of this text — the first verse of Numbers 33 ("These are the journeys of the children of Israel, which went forth out of the land of Egypt") — and some quotations from Numbers 34 that are included in the …

Mapping With Midwives: Sources About Jewish Midwives In Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam, Jordan Katz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, western European cities began to enact robust regulations concerning the training and licensure of midwives. The city of Amsterdam refined its bureaucratic procedures for midwife licensure earlier than other European locales, and all prospective midwives – including Jews – were required to register in the Collegium Obstetricum from 1668 onward. Midwives had to attend anatomy lectures, report their apprenticeships, and pass a comprehensive examination. Although individual Jewish midwives often went through standard municipal procedures to gain admittance to the profession, Jewish communities had their own internal methods of regulating midwives and ensuring …

Domestic, Religious And Public: The Use Of Space By Jewish Women In Early Modern Italy, Federica Francesconi

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Mirian (daughter of the late Abram Israel Mora) and Rachel (daughter of the late Raffael De Silva and widow of Isach Oliver), the authors of the two testaments published here for the first time, lived in the Venetian ghetto since about the 1630s-1640s. While the former was a Levantine Jew, the latter was a Ponentine.1 In a sense, both belonged to the same family and household, the De Silvas, who lived in the ghetto vecchio: Mirian was a servant while Rachel a matron. When Mirian and Rachel each became aware of their extreme illnesses—we do not know their respective ages—they …

Inquisitorial Prison As A Site Of Cross-Cultural Encounter: The Case Of Manuel Cardoso De Macedo Aka Abraham Pelengrino Guer, Ronnie Perelis

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Prisons are often a site of cross-cultural encounter and religious illumination. People from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds meet each other and inevitably share ideas and experiences. The inquisitorial prison housed individuals who were accused of crimes of conscience and thus the encounters that a prisoner would have in a secret prison of the Inquisition would often enough center on issues of belief and identity. I will look at a case from Lisbon in the early 1600s, where individuals from different socio-economic, ethnic and religious backgrounds meet and transform each other's religious outlook and commitments within prison walls. I will …

Absconding And Chasing Across The Western Sephardic Diaspora, Daniel Strum

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Merchants of the Western Sephardic diaspora engaged in travels. Traveling, however, often raised question among their creditors whether the purpose of a travel was really for legitimate business interests or an attempt to abscond with their funds. By examining cases of creditors chasing absconding debtors and the surveillance of debtors in arrears who might be about to flee, my presentation discusses the concepts of residence and absence from one’s place of residence within a diaspora characterized by widespread mobility and secret identities and property. The Western Sephardic diaspora interwove extensive trading networks and early modern commercial techniques required traders to …

Fluid Boundaries: Rivers And The Jewish Communities Of Early Modern Ashkenaz, Debra Kaplan, Joshua Teplitsky

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In this discussion we explore an aspect of space that is often overlooked in studies of Jewish life in the early modern period: the interactions between Jews and the natural world. Our session will focus around Jewish engagement with rivers, and how waterways shaped the spatial dimensions of daily life. In European settlements across the continent rivers bisect cities and towns, and were arteries of commerce, trade, and travel. Waterways also connected settlements, were a site of contact for non-elite Jews, and, as a force of nature, impacted the lives of Jewish and Christian neighbors. Rivers could be used as …

August 2018, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Kiddush Levana; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Community Notices

Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish Germany: An enduring presence from the fourth to the twenty-first century.

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …