Jewish Studies Commons^™

Who’S Afraid Of Anne Frank? Or Why White Supremacists Should Fear This Book, Laura S. Brown

Journal of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

No abstract provided.

Weaving Rituals For Resistance: Queering The Tallit, Sam Simons

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“Weaving Rituals for Resistance” explores the history and significance of the tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, as an immersive and transformative experience. Since 2022, I have been researching the historical development, making practices, and use of tallit, and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and power. Traditionally, tallit are worn by men; that is changing. There is no one way to feel about wearing tallit, but many share that they feel safe, protected and held. I worked with my rabbi to develop educational programming – a five-session course in Fall 2023. We covered history, textual sources for design and use, biblical …

[Review Of The Book Jews, Food, And Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook And The Sephardic Culinary Heritage, By H. J. Piner.], Martha Daas

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[Introduction] Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are. This should be the motto of any book that examines the medieval food culture of Iberia. In her new book entitled Jews, Food, and Spain, Hélène Jawhara Piñer seeks to demonstrate both the process through which the Jewish cuisine of the Iberian Middle Ages acted as a cultural identifier, and how this culinary culture has been maintained in the modern Sephardic communities. Piñer's book aims to fill the gap in Spanish culinary history by "reintegrating Jewish cuisine into the historically transmitted food heritage of …

“You Are Not Obligated To Complete The Work, But Neither Are You Free To Desist From It.” Richmond Jews In Social Activism Post Civil Rights, Tracy S. Herman

Theses and Dissertations

For centuries, the Jewish people have faced expulsions, pogroms, massacres, and Propaganda. that runs so deep it would be like staring into an abyss. This oppression has motivated Jewish activists worldwide to fight back not only on behalf of the Jewish community but for many areas of perceived need. Jewish involvement in social activism in the U.S. has been particularly recognized by scholars of the labor and Civil Rights movements. This thesis is based on eighteen oral history interviews focused on social activism in Richmond, Virginia since the Civil Rights era. The author conducted these interviews in 2021, 2023, and …

Renewing Study Into The Oldest Hatred: Introduction To The Law Vs. Antisemitism Symposium, David Schraub

Lewis & Clark Law Review

This short essay provides an introduction to the Lewis & Clark Law Review's "Law vs. Antisemitism" symposium, which grew out of the conference by the same name hosted at Lewis & Clark in the spring of 2023. In addition to overviewing the contributions to the symposium, the introduction provides some background on the relative paucity of legal scholarship that has addressed antisemitism, and the importance of including antisemitism in the otherwise robust legal academic conversation occurring around other forms of oppression and social discrimination.

Politicizing Antisemitism Amidst Today’S Educational Culture Wars, Lili Levi

Lewis & Clark Law Review

The traditional narrative of American Jewry emphasizes American exceptionalism with respect to antisemitism. But there have been clear signs of a resurgence of public antisemitism in the United States even before the massive rise in antisemitic expression and incidents associated with the Israel-Hamas war of fall 2023.

One of the notable aspects of the rise and normalization of antisemitic expression is the deployment of antisemitism as a political tool. For example, in addition to Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of complicity in antisemitism, both federal policy since the Trump era and state antiantisemitism legislation have targeted campus antisemitism in …

I Am Not A Hero: Heroic Action Divorces The Hero From The Political Community, Ari Kohen, Brian Riches, Andre Sólo

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Most people who perform a heroic act will, afterward, deny that their actions were heroic and claim that anyone would have done the same, even though that is demonstrably false (and, often, others were present who failed to act heroically at all). The literature on the psychology of heroism has never investigated why this is. This theoretical paper proposes an answer and seeks to provoke exploration of a previously unexplored topic. We note that people who undertake heroic action face a unique conflict: they embody their community’s highest values, while simultaneously breaking norms to stand apart from that community. We …

Rabbi Mordukh Krol: “Little Man” In The Background Of The Soviet Epoch, Tetiana Savchuk

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article analyzes the life path of Rabbi Mordukh Krol in the background of the socio-political transformations in Soviet Ukraine (1920-1940s). For the first time, special sources are introduced into the scholarly circulation such as the Rabbi’s correspondences addressed to the Jews of Denmark, Germany, France, the USA, the USSR, Palestine, and Africa during the Holodomor. Major milestones of the Rabbi’s life are identified. He served in the Chernihiv and Melitopol Region, in Voroshylovhrad, Novoukrayinka of Odessa, and later Kirovohrad regions, in Dnipropetrovsk. Rabbi M. Krol, who was the father of many children, was forced to fight with the challenges …

World Spirit And The Apotheosis Of Artificial Superintelligence: A Speculative Design Proposal, Ian Gonsher

Scholarly Research

This essay puts forth a speculative design proposal for a device with affordances for talking to, and receiving responses from, God. We begin with an analysis and critique of the concept of God, framing this concept within an understanding of Hegelian Spirit (Geist) and technological evolution. In this context, Spirit, or World Spirit (Weltgeist), can be characterized as the aggregate consciousness of all people - as human consciousness itself: In the simplest terms, this immanent framing of the “mind of God” is culturally and socially constituted as the communication that people engage in with each other, in all the diverse …

Negative Psychology Of Anti-Semitism: Fear Of The Uncategorizable, Benjamin Strosberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anti-Semitism is a pervasive global issue, particularly prominent in the United States. Studying and defining anti-Semitism prove remarkably challenging for scholars, leading to inadequate understanding and exclusion from contemporary academic discourse and social justice initiatives. In this dissertation, I made the case that anti-Semitism is hard to categorize, stemming, in part, from the difficulty in categorizing what it is to be Jewish, which seems to be multi-form (a figure of thought, a race, an ethnicity, a religion, a nation, none of the above). In thinking about the difficulty in categorization, I constellated various instances of anti-Jewish practices across historical epochs …

Jewish Music Sound Recording Collections In The United States, Judith S. Pinnolis

Faculty Works

This chapter examines several significant Jewish music sound-recording collections in the United States, most of which originated as private collections but are now housed at academic institutions. Their origins provide insight into individual agency tied to different understandings of Jewish music. A discussion of their complexities from a library-science perspective focuses on conservation and preservation as well as bibliographic control and other issues in which the complexities of Jewish music unfold more clearly. Authenticity, comprehensiveness, and other constructions demonstrate how sound-recording collections reflect the overall difficulties of defining and delimiting Jewish music. Subsequent discussions and observations on access and audiences …

Entre La Exclusión Y La Empatía: Conocimientos Y Sentimientos De La Juventud Judía De Buenos Aires Sobre La Memoria Colectiva De “La Comunidad Judía” En La Última Dictadura Argentina (1976-1983) / Between Exclusion And Empathy: Knowledge And Sentiments Of Jewish Youth In Buenos Aires About The Collective Memory Of The “The Jewish Community” During The Argentine Dictatorship (1976-1983), Rachel Colson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

La última dictadura cívico-militar en Argentina es tanto parte del pasado como del futuro. El “Proceso de Reorganización Nacional” instalado por las Fuerzas Armadas trajo opresión política y violencia extrema hacia la gente en contra del régimen. Desde su fin, la sociedad ha enfrentado el problema de cómo recordar esta época. La memoria forma parte importante de la identidad social argentina, pero es complicada debido a la experiencia de determinados grupos durante la dictadura. En estos años, los judíos sufrieron una victimización especial dentro de los campos clandestinos de detención—los sitios de tortura y desaparición—de las Fuerzas Armadas. Mientras algunos …

Dancers Of The Book: Yemenite, Persian, And Kurdish Jewish Dance, Quinn Bicer

Anthós

Despite the cultural significance of dance in Jewish communities around the world, research into Middle Eastern Jewish dance outside of the modern nation-state of Israel is sorely under-researched. This article aims to help rectify this by focusing on Yemenite, Persian/Iranian, and Kurdish Jewish dance and explores how these dancers have functioned and been received within the societies they have been a part of. The methods that have gone into this article are a combination of analyzing primary source recorded dances and existing secondary source research into the dance of these communities. Through these methods, this article reveals how Yemenite, Iranian, …

Contributors, Jewish Folklore And Ethnology Editors

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Author biographies for contributors to this issue.

Yahrzeit ... Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020), Simon J. Bronner

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Haya Bar-Itzhak was a driving force behind this journal and a shaper of the global study of Jewish folklore and ethnology. In her teaching, writing, and editing, she brought into relief the long lineage of work in periodicals devoted to Jewish folklore beginning in the nineteenth century (Bar-Itzhak 2010, 16–26) and inspired the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology (JFE) with a vision for a journal that would go beyond an audience of Jews to become indispensable for all folklorists and ethnologists. The JFE editors, indeed all who care about understanding tradition, lost a friend and mentor when …

Yiddish Songs And Jewish Futures: A Besere Velt, Partisan Music, And Modern Performance, Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

A Besere Velt, the Boston Worker’s Circle community chorus, performs for a modern audience the music of Yiddish-speaking Jewish partisans and ghetto resisters. Through active transmission and re-interpretation of partisan and ghetto songs, A Besere Velt invokes East-European Jewish tradition and creates a liminal space ripe with new possibility. In the process, the chorus gives these old songs life for contemporary Jews. The analysis situates the songs within the genre of Yiddish music and investigates through interviews ways that members build meaning through the performance of partisan music, the construction of Jewish space, and the promise of Jewish futures.

Landscape Into Legend: Tracking Lost Tribes And Crypto-Jews Across New Mexican Terrain, Judith S. Neulander

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The essay traces the “Lost Tribes of Israel” legend to the purported academic discovery of lost and hidden “crypto-Jews” in contemporary New Mexico. The essay explores perceptions and beliefs of Jewish diasporic survival and identity in folkloristic, religious, historical, and genomic contexts. Analysis exposes pseudo-ethnography and pseudoscience as the basis for New Mexican claims, influenced in part by habitual association of the regional landscape with lost, hidden, and/or “wandering” Jews.

Gendered Foods And Traditions Among Argentine Jewry, Jacqueline Laznow

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Examining layers of meaning found in personal stories, folktales, memoirs, recipes, and cookbooks collected from interviewees in Argentina and in Israel, this essay interprets the women’s role in Jewish-Argentine identity formation and preservation in connection to processes of forming private and collective memory. Traditional Jewish foodways generally and gefilte-fish specifically in contrast to traditional Argentine foodways such as meat grilling are analyzed as a symbolic praxis that strengthens Argentine identity.

The Rise Of Judaic Calligraphy In The Twentieth Century, Stephen Michael Cohen

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

Excluding religiously required safrut (e.g., handwritten Torah scrolls, mezuzot, tefillin, gittin), artistic aspects of Judaic calligraphy declined after moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century. Rediscovery of medieval calligraphic techniques in late nineteenth-century Britain, plus contemporaneous typographical studies in Germany, spurred revival of artistic calligraphy. The first Arts and Crafts movement, pre-World War I German research into aesthetic letterforms, and the Bezalel Academy sparked a rise of secularized Judaic calligraphy. Growth of folk arts and ethnic pride in the 1960s and accessible photocopiers in the 1970s allowed nonspecialists to become expert calligraphers.

Bird Spies And Poisoned Tomatoes: New Rumors And Legends In The Middle East, Steve Siporin

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

New rumors and legends about spy animals, attack animals, and attempted mass poisonings, all purportedly the work of Israel, circulate in Middle Eastern newspapers, television, and radio. This essay answers two sets of questions regarding these narratives, one regarding belief and the other regarding antisemitism. The analysis shows that the rumors and legends express attitudes in addition to conveying information. Whether or not any, some, or all these transgressions occurred, the narratives ineluctably serve to assert and confirm the depravity of a constructed enemy. They reveal unexpected continuities with age-old antisemitic folklore.

“They Have Countless Books Of This Craft”: Folklore And Folkloristics Of Yemeni Jewish Amulets, Tom Fogel

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The nineteenth-century voyager Yaakov Sapir published accounts of Yemeni Jewish amulets that provide significant historical and ethnographic sources for a study of Yemeni Jewish occult practices and the perception of them by non-Jews. The combination of blurred religious boundaries characterizing occult traditions, the prominent place of the Judeo Arabic language, and Arabic or pseudo-Arabic magical scripts constructed occult traditions as an essential social and cultural role for the Jewish minority, and simultaneously made these traditions the center of a polemical discourse.

Introduction: Jewish Folklore And Ethnology: What, Why, And Whither?, Simon J. Bronner

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

The inspiration for and significance of field-based Jewish folklore and ethnology studies as a distinct branch of learning devoted to the understanding of tradition in relation to diasporic Jewish studies and folkloristics is traced back to the Talmudic directive to “Go out and see what the people do.” The shapers of the field include S. An-Ski, Max Grunwald, Yoysef-Yehude Lerner, and Dov Noy along with theoretical influences of Franz Boas and Erving Goffman heralding a shift from textual sources to analyses of practice and performance. The characteristic definition, content, method, and theory of Jewish folklore and ethnological studies since the …

Note On Transliteration, Jewish Folklore And Ethnology Editors

Jewish Folklore and Ethnology

As a publication with an international scope and audience, JFE uses transliteration to maintain flow in the essays and make the pronunciation of languages accessible for readers of English.

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Jewish Wordless Singing In Music Therapy And Burnout Prevention With Outpatient Mental Health Clinicians, Elizabeth Zinn

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Existing literature has shown a rise in burnout levels for mental health clinicians, especially in light of the recent and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This capstone project focused on understanding how Jewish wordless melodies (niggunim) may be used as a technique in group singing in music therapy as a strategy for preventing clinician burnout. Research has demonstrated that music therapy techniques may be beneficial in addressing the causes and components of burnout though there is minimal research on the use of niggunim in music therapy, and none on the use of niggunim to prevent burnout. A single-session niggunim-based intervention was …

Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Caitlyn Aldersea, Justin Bravo, Sam Allen, Anna Block, Connor Block, Emma Buechler, Maria De Los Angeles Bustillos, Arianna Carlson, William Christensen, Olivia Kachulis, Noah Craver, Kate Dillon, Muskan Fatima, Angel Fernandes, Emma Finch, Colleen Cassidy, Amy Fishman, Andrea Francis, Stacia Fritz, Simran Gill, Emma Gries, Rylie Hansen, Shannon Powers, Jacqueline Martinez, Zachary Harker, Ashley Hasty, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Kathleen Hopps, Adelaide Kerenick, Colin Kleckner, Ci Koehring, Elijah Kruger, Braden Krumholz, Maddie Leake, Lyneé Alves, Seraphina Loukas, Yatzari Lozano Vazquez, Haley Maki, Emily Martinez, Sierra Mckinney, Audrey Mitchell, Kipling Newman, Audrey Ng, Megan Lucyshyn, Andrew Nguyen, Stevie Ostman, Casandra Pearson, Alexandra Penney, Julia Gielczynski, Tyler Ball, Anna Rini, Christina Rorres, Simon Ruland, Helayna Schafer, Emma Sellers, Sarah Schuller, Claire Shaver, Kevin Summers, Isabella Shaw, Madison Sinar, Claudia Pena, Apshara Siwakoti, Carter Sorensen, Madi Sousa, Anna Sparling, Alexandra Revier, Brandon Thierry, Dylan Tyree, Maggie Williams, Lauren Wols

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

DU Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Works

Out Of Exile: The Evolution Of Moroccan Jewishness, Yana Levy

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Morocco once had the largest Jewish population of any Islamic country, but in 1948 the creation of the Israeli state drew Jews out of Morocco in massive numbers. Since then the Jews have a ghostly presence, spoken about but hardly seen. Curiously, the void left by their flight has been filled by a conscious effort on the part of Moroccan historical institutions to retain the presence of Jews in collective memory. Well maintained sites, and spaces such as the Jewish quarter that are linked to Jewish presence continue to contribute to a discourse which presents Moroccan and Jewish histories as …

Stolperstein/Stumbling Stone For Holocaust Survivor Otto Heimann/Bob Hymann, Bochum/German, Toronto/Kanada Und New York, Ny, Usa, Courtney Conte, Mona Eikel-Pohen

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The documentation tries to capture the life of Holocaust survivor Otto Heimann/Bob Hyman who spent his youth in Bochum-Langendreer, Germany, and was forced by the National Socialists to leave parents, home, and country. The documentation does not claim to give a full picture, just an insight into Otto Heimann's/Bob Hyman's life.

It will be read out on June 6, 2023 in Bochum, Germany when a Stolperstein, a stumbling stone, will be place near Alte Bahnhstraße 6 in Bochum-Langendreer, Germany, to commemorate Otto Heimann/Bob Hyman, so that we and future generations may learn from history.

Diese Dokumentation versucht, das Leben Bob …

Resisting Nazism Within Hitler’S Germany, Patricia M. Mische

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.