Jewish Studies

The First of Nisan, The Forgotten Jewish New Year, Part II

By guest contributor Joel S. Davidi In my last post on the history of the first of Nisan as a Jewish new year I discussed the history of this now mostly forgotten holiday into the tenth century. Until this point, this… Continue Reading →

2017/10/04 3

Towards a History of Hebrew Book Collecting: A Review of this Year’s Manfred R. Lehmann Workshop in the History of the Hebrew Book

by contributing editor Yitzchak Schwartz Last month I once again attended the Manfred R. Lehmann Memorial Master Workshop in the History of the Hebrew Book at the University of Pennsylvania. This is my fifth year attending the workshop and my… Continue Reading →

2017/06/28 1

The First of Nisan, The Forgotten Jewish New Year

by guest contributor Joel S. Davidi It is late March and the weather is still cold. The sounds of Arabic music and exuberant conversation emanate from an elegant ballroom in Brooklyn New York. No, it’s not a wedding or a… Continue Reading →

2017/05/29 4

Mandate Agent, Colonial Subject, and Jewish Citizen : Jamil Sasson

by guest contributor James Casey On a chilly winter day in 1941 Jamil Sasson, a Syrian employee of the French Mandate bureaucracy, sent a letter to the Secrétaire général du Haut-Commissariat de la République Française en Syrie et au Liban… Continue Reading →

2017/04/17 0

An Anti-Anti-Lachrymose Approach to Jewish History?

by contributing editor Yitzchak Schwartz In his seminal 1928 essay, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?,” historian Salo Wittmayer Baron argues against what he refers to in his later work as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.”… Continue Reading →

2017/02/22 7

Social Media in an Analog Age: The Henry Subscription (1898-1899)

by guest contributor Elizabeth Everton In a 2009 interview, Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey, drew upon the dictionary definition of “tweet” – “a short burst of inconsequential information” – to characterize his creation. Ten years after Twitter’s inception, few would persist… Continue Reading →

2016/11/09 3

American Zionism: A Mass-Cultural Movement?

by guest contributor Kyle Stanton Mordecai Noah was one of the first Jews to reach national prominence in America. A politician, newspaper publisher, and man of letters, Noah was notoriously dismissed from his post as Consul of Tunisia by Secretary… Continue Reading →

2016/09/07 3

From American Jewish History to American Jewish Studies: Advice for a Complicated Relationship

by contributing editor Yitzchak Schwartz In her 2000 Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies article on American Jewish history, historian Hasia Diner notes a new trend in the field in which a growing number of works were focusing on Jews’ self-understanding… Continue Reading →

2016/06/20 4

Censoring Early Modern Hebrew Texts: A Review of The Manfred R. Lehmann Memorial Master Workshop in the History of the Hebrew Book at the University of Pennsylvania

by Yitzchak Schwartz Each year, The Manfred R. Lehmann Memorial Master Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania brings together enthusiasts of the Hebrew book to study topics in Hebrew book history with leading scholars in the field. Housed at the Katz… Continue Reading →

2016/05/30 4

Apes, Jews, and Others: a reading of Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” and Bernard Malamud’s “God’s Grace”

by guest contributor Yaelle Frohlich On the surface, Franz Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” (1917) and Bernard Malamud‘s last finished novel, God’s Grace (1982), appear quite different, but they each boast a striking similar feature: Both… Continue Reading →

2016/05/23 1

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