Salon Jewish Studies Blog

The Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania started the public podcast series Jews in Business: Myth and Reality. Three Podcast are available at the moment:

1. Jonathan Karp - A Head Without a Body? Reconstructing the History of Jews in Business
2. Evelyne Oliel-Grausz - Kinship, Commerce, and Trade Networks: The Early Modern Sephardic Diaspora
3. Adam Teller - Before Rothschild: Jewish Businessmen in Eighteenth Century Eastern Europe

A new podcast David Pilgrim (Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of Sociology, Ferris State University; founder of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia) is available on U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum website.

DAVID PILGRIM:
The Jim Crow Museum is a collection of anti-black, civil rights, and segregation memorabilia. I was the original donor. People ask me, "When did you start collecting and why?" And I've always collected what I call "contemptible collectibles." I collected objects that I thought would demonstrate how those racist ideas permeated our culture. And so you would have an ashtray for example with an image of an African American in the middle of it with fire, red lips and wild, darting eyes and mismanaged hair, kind of a crazed look. But I hesitate to give you that characterization because there are so many caricatures of African Americans. So, for example, the so-called tragic mulatto imagery would look very different from the Tom or the Sambo or the mammy or the pickaninny. So it's a little bit disingenuous to describe a so-called typical piece, because there's just so many ways that the features, the physical features of African Americans are distorted on everyday objects.
If you had to come up with one word to describe the objects that we have and similar objects, that word would be propaganda. When I used to think of propaganda I thought of it as leaflets and posters. And then it hit me one day that an ashtray with a caricatured image of a member of an ethnic group can be as much propaganda as a leaflet or poster or print. And I think the most effective propaganda is when people don't realize that that is what is going on, when they think they're just playing a game or just using an ashtray. When you reduce hatred to game playing, you give a level of legitimacy to it that is mind boggling. So when you turn and you look at that detergent box or you look at that game, that toy, that ashtray—these everyday objects with a function—they become everyday ways to convince people that a racial hierarchy made sense.
You know, the hardest thing for me is to figure out how to present the material to people when they come in. What you discover is, is that people looking at the same thing come up with very, very, very different interpretations of what it is they're seeing. And so the one person when he looks at Little Black Sambo says, "You know, that's a cute, clever little boy. And reading that story just reminds me of wholesome, good times with my father and oatmeal." And then someone else looks at that and they says, "Well, that reminds me of a vestige of segregation and slavery. And it hurts me."
So what we try to do is to get people talking. Now, why is that hard for me? It's hard for me because when people walk in there I want to tell them what they see. So when a person starts talking about "Oh, why should you be offended at that?" There's a part of me that wants to scream, "How could you not see the offense?" But I don't. And I've gotten much better over the years in finding where people are, trying to understand where they are, and then allowing people at different places and different points in their journey to explain where they are, and so you have meaningful dialogue. My fear is not that people won't think the way I do or agree with my values; it is that they won't talk about these things at all, that they'll just keep muddling along as if everything's fine.
I think that systematically disseminating information that defames and belittles others actually belittles and degrades our entire society. As corny and trite as that sounds, I think that antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia…I think those things undermine democracy. I think they make of democracy a lie. I mean as long as we have these "us versus thems," and as long as people are hurt in our society and others think that's their problem, then we undermine this nation. So the trick is, is to figure out a way to get people that are not themselves directly hurt to believe that they are a part of the same "We." And that for me has been I guess the thrust of what it is I've spent my life trying to do; trying to make the "We" bigger. (fragment of the transcript)

"Today, on April 21, 2009, the World Digital Library, one of the most significant projects refering to digital primary sources on different cultures across the world, was launched.

The mission:

"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

Promote international and intercultural understanding;
Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries."

A new podcast Leon Merrick: Importance of Work in the Lodz Ghetto is available on U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum website.

"Everybody had to have a job. Because if you had a job you get an extra bowl of soup in the place of wherever you work. So my father worked in the main hospital, we had five hospitals in the ghetto. They were clinics before the war, but then the Jews came in when they formed the ghetto, so they made a hospital. And my father worked in the hospital and my mother got a job in the orphanage. And of course later on, in a couple years or so, I wanted to get a job too. I’d seen these young fellows going around with satchels delivering mail so I told my father, “Maybe I can do…maybe I can do this.”
But later on, so for the first year and a half I had no jobs. My mother worked, and from the place of employment she got an extra bowl of soup so she can share the remaining ration with us. My father he also worked, he also got some food." (fragment of the transcript)

(via USHMM@Twitter)

The exhibition Sent to their death, the deportation of Jews, Roma and Sinti from Hamburg 1940 to 1945 (Kunsthaus [Arthouse], Hamburg] "is designed with a conceptual focus on the perspectives of more than 7,500 deportees and what happened to them at the sites of deportation. It includes video and audio interviews with survivors, photos, documents such as letters and diaries, and original memento items. These exhibition items help give back to the victims their faces and their life stories, which have been obscured by the anonymous lists, standardized forms, and the administrative operations of the perpetrators, with their seemingly 'correct' division of labor.
" (www.deportationsausstellung.hamburg.de)

(via H-Soz-u-Kult)

(front-cover of the catalog Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater)

The Jewish Museum, New York presented "the first exhibition devoted to the extraordinary artwork created for Russian Jewish theater productions in the 1920s and 1930s. The exhibition will bring to light a remarkable period in the early years of the Soviet Union when innovative visual artists, including Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, and Robert Falk joined forces with avant-garde playwrights, actors, and theatrical producers to create a theater experience with extraordinary mass appeal. Through paintings, costume and set designs, posters, photographs, film clips and theater ephemera - many of which have never been exhibited before- Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 will capture an exhilarating but fleeting moment in the cultural history of the Soviet Union."

Andrea Kirsh wrote an exciting article about "a fascinating exhibition" in theartblog.org

Even if the exhibition moves to the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, from April 25 to September 7, 2009), selected artifacts and extensive information on the subject can be found on the Website of the Jewish Museum, New York

Further Online Exhibitions at N.Y.C. Jewish Museum are:

1) Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

2) Off the Wall: Artists at Work

3) From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig

4) Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

5) The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend

6) Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art

March 26, 2009, Christopher Leigton (Voices of antisemtism - a podcast series at the U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum, Washington)

"I came to Jewish-Christian relations in large measure because my closest friends belonged to different religious traditions. And they had a way of raising doubts and generating confusion that simply had to be addressed if I was going to hold fast to what my ancestors had passed on to me. Christians and Jews share some of the same narratives. And the question that haunts us is whether we can learn to honor the distinct ways that we each read these stories, and dismantle those understandings that have given rise to very serious and anguished relations between our communities. And so, the challenge of living in a religiously plural world is developing the habits and reflexes that allow us to celebrate that diversity and be enlarged and expanded by understandings that don’t belong to us.
For centuries, Christians have made triumphal claims that were profoundly dismissive of those who do not agree with them. And as a result, the church can become ingrown. It can fail to develop an aptitude for self-criticism. And if there is not an ability to see oneself through the eyes of the other, then one ultimately ends up blinded to larger truths that might inspire us to do better and to improve and to ennoble our tradition.
I think that what happens through the interfaith dialogue when it’s done well, is that one has the rude realization that the tradition that one thought one knew, that one has been living, is far more mysterious and complex than one ever imagined, and that one may have to go back and learn how to reread and reinterpret it anew. So in a sense, to live in a tradition is always to call it into question." (fragment of the transcript)

"Tuning Baghdad brings together a growing archive of rare video footage, audio clips and historical information on Iraqi Jewish musicians and the music scene that was displaced from Baghdad in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The last generation of Iraqi Jewish musicians who performed in Baghdad, now in their 70s and 80s, represent an era when an unusually large number of the Iraqi-Jews were composing and performing Arabic music. For decades, these musicians were the national teachers and beloved performers of Iraq’s traditional maqams and modern compositions on Iraq’s National Broadcast Station.
Many of these Iraqi musicians and enthusiasts now live in Israel, England or North America where they trade home-made cassettes and organize musical parties at which this international community comes together. The musicians continue to play and produce an Arabic repertoire of Iraqi folk songs, popular Egyptian and Lebanese songs as well as Iraqi-Jewish ceremonial songs at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs. The video chapters on this website feature intimate performances, conversations in Iraqi-Jewish dialect, and rehearsals with key musicians, fans, historians and ethnomusicologists. They also feature home-movies of ‘Charlghis’ from the 1970s until today. The podcasts and links accompanying each video act as tangents, providing an expanded layer to the performers, the songs, and their lyrics. To accommodate this complex scene, the audio/visual component will be regularly updated with donations of rare cassettes and footage."

Up to now, following podcasts including additional audio material are available in the categories (no direct links available) listed below:

1) Audiotopia ("various Arabic music jam sessions by Iraqi-Jewish musicians now living in Israel") - fifteen audio-tracks of Imam and Naim;

2) On the maqam ("records some attempts to explain the eastern scale of music called the ‘maqam’, to Western listeners") four audio-tracks of Yair Dalal, Elias Shasha and Abraham Salman;

3) Musicans in Iraq ("a chapter narrated by Yeheskel Kojaman one of the few ethnomusicologists who has first-hand experience and knowledge of the popular music scene in Iraq before the emigration of the Jewish population") two audio-tracks of Rashid Al-Qundarchi and Yakub Al-Imari

4) Life of the party ("a compilation of excerpts from home movies taken at ‘charlghis’ or house-parties in the [Jewish] diaspora from the 1970s until the 2000s")four audio-tracks (incl. mixed tapes) of Sol Basha and Abdel Halim Hafez

5) Other features a radio interview with Regine Basha and Julieta Aranda about Radio Baghdad as well as two recordings "Babylonian Selihot" produced by Yakhin Hakal

(tuningBaghdad.net via http://twitter.com/teruah)

The lecutre was held by Prof. Sue Vice on the topic "False Testimony" March (17, 2009)

"In this talk, Sue Vice explores the phenomenon of false Holocaust testimony and ask two questions: first, whether these inventions are part of a wider phenomenon of invented victimhood; second, if false testimony about the Holocaust is different from other kinds of imposture, and is a form of representation which is only to be expected as the Holocaust stops being an event within living memory."

Peter Brantley (Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation) on The orphan monopoly:

"There are a large number of ways that books might fall into orphan status. A quick consultation of Peter Hirtle’s copyright table at Cornell Univ. allows us to see how easy this is. The impact of foreign rights is fiendishly complicated, and even the rules for U.S. publications are baroque; for older works it is a crafty rightsholder indeed who can figure out whether they might retain a claim. As Peter Hirtle observed to me in an email, 'The lengthening copyright terms and the gradual removal of formalities (especially the automatic renewal of works published since 1963) means that works that would have passed into the public domain in the past because the rights owners weren't concerned are still protected. The chances that the rights holders are either unidentifiable or not locatable also goes up.'
[...]
There are rough estimates of around 7 million digitized volumes in GBS [Google Book Search;] (see also: Salon JS Google Book Search - Volltexte (Zionistica) [German]) subtracting 750,000 newly identified works gives us 6.25 million. Let’s take a guess that there are maybe 1.5 million public domain works (this is not entirely out of the blue, but informed by earlier orphan works studies and reports), leaving 4.75 million titles. That’s a lot of books – about 2/3 of the total. It might be more, it might be less; it is a big number.
[...]
A large number of these orphans are going to be truly public domain books, just like pre-1923 works. However, we may never know that they actually have public domain status due to historically incomplete record keeping, and the lack of a national rights tracking and notification infrastructure." (via Archivalia@Twitter)

Recommended:
Article "Public domain" on Wikipedia

Articles in Archivalia ref. to "Public domain" (German)

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS a database of 4,120,985 [March, 18th 2009] freely usable media files TO WHICH ANYONE CAN CONTRIBUTE!

CENTROPA bills itself as "[t]he first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, [they] are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before. (comprehensive information on the project can also be found in Speelbound Blog - Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies)
Centropa also includes a film database called THE LIBRARY OF RESCUED MEMORIES - "[a]n ever-expanding library of short biographical films, each based on our interviews and family pictures". At the moment twenty stories can be viewed online.

Check out a further seven ONLINE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS on Salon Jewish Studies!

The Archive of American Soviet Jewry Movement (1963-1990) was established by the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), New York. The movement has been a "worldwide effort to obtain freedom for Jews in the Soviet Union to practice their religion without state persecution or discrimination or to emigrate to Israel, the United States or elsewhere to seek the blessings of freedom, and to pursue lives of their own choosing."

The Archive comprises records of individuals, grassroots and national organizations. Besides information on the historical backround on the movement, the history of the movement itself and a list of archival holdings, a number of particular guides to selected record groups can be found:

The Jerry Goodman Papers will be available from April 2009.
A list of audio-recordings (PDF) is available online as well. Furthermore the Union Catalog of the Center for Jewish History (CJH) contains 34 posters from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.

(Picture: Poster from the National Conference on Soviet Jewry "Let my people go")

The Library of Congress (Washington) provides access to a large number of WEBCASTS including a huge variety of topics. The website covers the sections Biography & History, Culture & Performing Arts, Education, Government & World Affairs, Poetry & Literature, Religion and Science & Technology. Following webcasts may be of interest in context of Jewish histories and cultures (among others):

• Quick to the Party: Southern Jews and the Americanization of Hanukkah, Peggy Pearlstein, Dianne Ashton (2007)
  


• Baghdad Jews in British Burma, Ruth Fredman Cernea (2008)
  


• Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community, Laura Cohen Appelbaum, Wendy Turman (2007)
  


• Jewish Women's Issues, Susan Weidman Schneider (2004)
  


• Traditional Judaism or Reform, Marsha Rozenblit (2008)
  


• The Royal Court Preacher and the Hebrew Book, Menachem Schmelzer (2004)
  


• Holy Moses! A Cultural History of the Ten Commandments in Modern America, Jenna Joselit (2007)
  


• The Jewish Book in America, Jonathan D. Sarna (2004)
  


• The Warren and Margot Coville Collection of Photographs from the Clarence H. White School of Photography, Warren Coville, Kathy Erwin (2001)
  


• Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israel Conflict, Ronald Florence (2007)
  


• I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms, Debra Band (2008)
  


• Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden, Debra Band (2008)
  


• Old Cultures/New Contexts: Presenting the Traditional Music and Dance of Urban Immigrant Communities, Ethel Raim (2008)
  


• A Bibliographer Encounters the Muses: Reflections on the Yiddish Theater and Its Legacy, Zachary M. Baker (2007)
  


• Writing the Story of America's Religious Origins, Susan Jacoby, Mark Noll, Steve Prothero, Jonathan Sarna (2006)
  

To view the webcasts you need to install the Real Player.

On Thursday the online archive Forced Labor 1939-1945 - Memory and History (only English homepage) was presented for the first time to the public. The project is a cooperation between the Freie Universität Berlin, the German Historical Museum and the Foundation "Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft" (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future). It is dedicated to over 12 Mio persons who had been forced to work for Nazi-Germany during WWII.
The archive provides access to 590 (192 video, 398 audio) interviews with 590 eyewitnesses from 26 countries. In addition to the interviews you will find transcripts, personal documents and photographs in the digital archive.
The access to the archive is restricted to (especially) pupils, students, scholars, research centers and further public institutions. ( For more information, please check the disclaimer [German only]). For further press material (English & German) click here.

The founders of Save the Music state on their project: "Save the Music is a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of cultural music through its digitization and placement on the Internet. Founded by Roman Ajzen a few years ago, Save the Music has already become the leading collector of Jewish Music LP's in the world. Just as important is our goal to become a virtual meeting place for performers to interact and post upcoming concerts, events and releases. We aim to preserve the past and assist its renaissance in the future. We plan to offer streaming and on-demand listening options so that the site can serve as both an online radio station and library[the site already do that]. This unique combination caters to everything from leisurely listening to research and everything in between. Together with extensive supplemental content such as historical context, original lyrics, transliterated lyrics, and translated lyrics, Save the Music will offer an informative experience to newcomers and connoisseurs alike."
The content of the site is devided into different sub-sections. For example, you can search after artists, albums and performers as well as after certain songs in Hebrew (751 songs), Ladino (221 songs), Yiddish (655 songs), English (65 songs), French (2 songs) and Instrumental Jewish Music (202 songs). Overall more than 1800 songs and over 170 albums have been digitized until know. All the songs are listenable online.

The National Film Board of Canada lauched a beta-website beta.nfb.ca, where you can watch Canadian documentary, animation and fiction. Among other are some clips, trailers and films, dealing with topics of Jewish history and culture, like:

At the moment are 665 films available online. The full database contains 10.000 entries.

Voices on Antisemitsm is a podcast series, hosted by the U. S. Holcaust Memorial Museum Washington. It represents a wide range of perspectives about antisemitism nowadays.

The Vilém Flusser Archive holds and looks after the literary remains of the cultural theorist Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) who was born in Prague, emigrated to Brasil in 1940 and returned to Europe in the early 1970s. Besides beeing one of the most influential thinkers of the new media, Flusser contributed to a philosophical discourse on Jewishness and saw himself first and foremost as a Prague Jew all his life.
The website of the archive links to a system of keywords (in German) which organize the material. Some photographs of Flusser and an audiostream of a series of lectures, he had been holding in Bochum in 1991 are available online. The archive that lately moved from the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe to the Berlin University of the Arts is holding approximately 2500 manuscripts of essays and books by Flusser, his extensive correspondence and parts of his personal library besides a growing section of secondary literature. The archive sees itself as an intersection of international research on Vilém Flusser. It can be visited on appointment.

Evidence of Yiddish Documented in European Societies (EYDES-עדות) is a project of the Foerderverein fuer Jiddische Sprache und Kultur e.V. Dusseldorf. In cooperation with the Columbia University Libraries, the Foerderverein works on the digitization and developement of the Language and Culture Archive of Ashenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), an "archive of approximately 6,000 hours of spoken Yiddish recorded in Israel, Alsace, the USA, Canada, and Mexico from emigrant speakers native to more than 600 communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe" (source: Columbia University-Website) EYDES itself provides access to selected recordings and transciptions from the LCAAJ.