Gavriel Rosenfeld joins us talk to discuss What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism, counterfactual history, and the role that history, truth, and fiction play in the public sphere.
Continue readingJoshua Furman joins us to discuss the Houston Jewish History Archive and how this effort to preserve the history of Houston’s Jewish community after Hurricane Harvey brings together the strands of American Jewish history and the challenges posed by human-caused climate change, how we try to preserve the past against the tide of a changing world and adapt in order to create sustainable lives and communities.
Continue readingSteven Weitzman joins us to talk about his book The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, and what the question of Jewish origins has to tell us about a range of issues including nationalism, the relationship between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and the ways the study of the past has often been put to use for political or ideological purposes.
Continue readingShari Rabin joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about her exciting new book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth Century America. We discuss why nineteenth-century American Jewish history is important, the debates over the distinctiveness of America and Jewish history here, the transformation of Jewish religious life in America, and the question of assimilation and what the history of American Jewish life has to tell us about our own time of DIY Judaism and post-denominationalism.
Continue readingIntroducing Jewish History Matters, a podcast dedicated to exploring how the newest research and enduring issues of Jewish studies have something to offer to our understanding of the world at large. It presents the argument that in order to understand history and the human experience broadly speaking, we need to understand the Jews. In this podcast, we’ll be exploring how and why this history matters and what we can learn from it in broad terms.
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