Jewish Studies Commons^™

Chavez, Robert, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Robert Chavez, born 1945, lived on Undercliff Avenue in the Bronx after his family settled there from Eastern Europe. His maternal grandparents immigrated from Russia, where his grandmother was adopted into the Tsar’s court. They bought a farm in Rockland County, where Chavez’s uncle was hidden for fear of getting drafted into WWII. His father, a traveling salesman, came from Brooklyn and joined the close knit family. Chavez remembers his building being a filled with first and second generation Jewish families, and became friendly with Puerto Rican peers in school. Being a middle child, he remembers playing with his brother …

Seperson, Susanne, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Summarizer: Reyna Stovall

Susane Seperson was born in Germany to Polish Holocaust survivors, Annie and David Bleiburg. Due to sponsorship from extended family living in New York, Seperson’s family immigrated to the United States. The family’s first home was on Tiffany Street and Seperson remembers being taken in a carriage to Crotona Park as a young child. Later, the family moved to an apartment above Seperson’s father’s cleaning store on 355 East 187th Street off Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse.

Seperson’s family remained in the 355 East 187th Street apartment through her elementary and junior high school years in …

Koppel, Mark, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Mark Koppel was born in October 1942 at Bronx Hospital. He first lived on 245 East Gun Hill Road before moving to Chicago with his family while his father served in World War II. Following the war, Koppel’s family moved back to the Bronx and settled in an apartment on 167th Street and College Avenue. He remembers the enighborhood he grew up in being predominantly Jewish and the close friendships he made with the other kids in his neighborhood and the street games they would play together.

Koppel’s family was not religiously observant growing up. However, Koppel had a Bar …

No Place Like Home? A Dialogical Journey With Shlomo Biderman, Daniel Raveh

Comparative Philosophy

This paper aims to think or rethink the concept of home as the contemporary avatar of the age-old question of self-identity. In dialogue with Shlomo Biderman, a comparative philosopher without borders who feels at home both in Jewish and Indian sources, the author assembles a philosophical jigsaw-puzzle made of different materials from different thinking traditions in attempt to reveal a new picture of home (and self) compatible with the changing world of immigration, relocation, dislocation and displacement, a world of emigrants, refugees and exiles, in which we live. The puzzle pieces include Plato’s cave, Isaiah Berlin’s “inner citadel”, Shmuel Yosef …

Rotman, Diana, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Diana Rotman was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrant parents who migrated from what was Poland in the 1920s. The youngest of three children, Rotman grew up on Teller Avenue and remembers the demographics of the street being overwhelmingly Jewish until the Bronx’s demographics began shifting and more black and Hispanic families started moving in. This prompted Rotman’s family to move to Mosholu Parkway when she was twelve years old, where she lived until moving to Manhattan after graduating high school.

Rotman was raised in an Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking household, and her family attended shul, kept kosher, and changed dishes …

Wolfthal, Diane Fialkow, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Diane Wolfthal was born in the Bronx in 1949 and lived on Pelham Parkway. However, shortly after her birth, Wolfthal’s family moved to the Amalgamated Housing Corporation. She remembers the co-op being an idyllic utopia. The co-op, from her memory, was very homogenous, with almost every family in the compound being Jewish, socialist, or communist, and either first or second-generation migrants. Additionally, most of the Jewish families at the Amalgamated Housing Corporation were secular. Wolfthal remembers observing Jewish holidays and going to Bar Mitzvahs but never having her Jewish practices tied to a notion of God. Instead, her Jewishness was …

Rifkin, Howard, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Howard Rifkin was born in the Bronx. His grandparents, both maternal and paternal, were Orthodox Jews. However, Rifkin and his parents were not, although he was bar mitzvahed in an Orthodox synagogue, the Mount Eden Jewish Center. While Rifkin’s mother was a homemaker, she eventually worked as a bookkeeper for Maurice Ratner. His father worked as a truck driver.

For his education, Rifkin attended PS 70, Wade Junior High School, and Taft High School, all of which were within several blocks of his childhood home. Rifkin attended university for a few years at Pace College. However, he dropped out and …

Brandon, Alfred, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Alfred Brandon was born on Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx in 1941 to second-generation Polish immigrants. Both sets of Brandon’s grandparents had immigrated to New York in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and his mother’s family owned a store before leaving New York for Los Angeles in 1942. Alfred’s paternal grandfather was trained as an upholsterer and likewise had his own store. When Alfred was nine months old, his family moved from their Bathgate Avenue apartment to White Plains Road, where he lived until he was nine.

Brandon grew up attending Congregation Brothers of Israel and attended Hebrew school in addition …

The Limits Of Solidarity: Leftist Jewish Israeli Activism For Palestine In The 1960’S And 2010’S, Ryann M. Hubbart

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

What does it mean for Jewish Israelis to engage in Palestinian solidarity? How do they navigate their positions of privilege in their activism? To explore these questions, I begin with a historical trajectory of the rise and fall of leftist Jewish Israeli activist organizations in response to global and local developments. I focus on two periods and their organizations: The Israeli Socialist Organization in the 1960’s and 1970’s and Ta’ayush and Physicians for Human Rights Israel in the 2010’s. In both cases the individuals in question are a very small minority of Israelis. From there I analyze these organizations and …

Rosen, Michael, Sophia Maier Garcia

Bronx Jewish History Project

Michael Rosen was born in the Bronx in Parkchester in 1943 to immigrant parents who came to New York in the early 20th century. He remembers the freedom of his childhood and going all over the city with his friends, visiting the New York Stock Exchange, sports games, and even once interviewing the artist Salvador Dalí.

Rosen had a fast-tracked education, skipping both kindergarten and one year of middle school, eventually graduating at the age of sixteen. Rosen went to PS 106 for elementary school and fondly remembers his teachers from the time. For middle school he attended Junior High …

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, …

Shifts In French Jewish Citizenship, 1789-1840s, Jourdin Wilson

Spectra Undergraduate Research Journal

The citizenship of Jews became more discussed as a result of changes from the French Revolution of 1789. There were a variety of perspectives between non-Jews and Jews, and between different groups of Jews. The research methodology involves the analysis of qualitative primary sources including government texts and debates, groups of everyday Jews, and French Jewish literature and journal excerpts. The theoretical framework of nationalism will guide how citizenship is analyzed in the research, based on Dean Kostantaras’s book Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848. Results show that the way French Jews fit into or engaged with society is quite …

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 …

Babel, Daniel Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a series of three memoiristic essays around the vortex of identity. The first is an exploration of how childhood overmedication split the continuity of the author’s self-conception. The second traces the slipperiness of Jewish and Queer identifications detailing their synthesis in the klezmer revival in New York City in late 1980s and early 90s. The third is a polyphonic narration of the recovery of a lost klezmer’s life story in the face of the silence of time and slaughter.

Changing Homelands: The Election Of Menachem Begin And The Diplomatic Campaign To Bring Ethiopian Jews To Israel, Abraham Silberstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines diplomatic efforts by Israel, the United States, and non-governmental organizations to facilitate the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. While much of the historical literature on this topic has focused on the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel, this thesis largely considers the mid-late 1970s. For the first 25 years of its existence, the State of Israel had not been eager to see Ethiopian Jews enter the country, and the government deemed them non-Jews for the purposes of immigration. This started to change in 1973, when the Sephardi Chief …

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

Review Of A Hebraic Inkling: C. S. Lewis On Judaism And The Jews, Erin Seidel

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

Review of P. H. Brazier, A Hebraic Inkling: C. S. Lewis on Judaism and the Jews (Eugene, OR, Pickwick Publications, 2021). 301 pages. $34.99. ISBN 9781725291973

Studies In The Ancient Israelite Cult Of Dead Kin, Joshua Jacobs

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 1986, Klaas Spronk published a monograph titled, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East. Although many have criticized Spronk’s central thesis, his study began a new era in biblical scholarship on death and the afterlife in ancient Israel. More specifically, it sparked renewed interest in the study of the relationship between the living and the dead. Just three years after Spronk’s work, Theodore J. Lewis published his own study, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit (1989). Lewis affirmed and developed evidence for one of the foundational aspects of Spronk’s book: in …