Jewish studies

[clapping] [gentle music] Welcome everybody to Jewish Quest, the podcast from The Louis Jacobs Foundation, a part of Masorti Judaism in the UK, and each week I'm joined by a special guest to help us deconstruct the week's Parsha.

And of course, this week we start our fifth year of going through the weekly Parshiot, and it is wonderful as we come once again to Bereshit to be joined to open this year by Professor James Diamond, who is the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, and also former director of the university's Friedberg Genizah Project.

He holds a PhD in religious studies and medieval Jewish thought from the University of Toronto, has-- is widely published and, of course, is the author of Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment, Converts, Heretics, um, and Lepers, and also Maimonides and the Outsider and Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon.

And very soon to come to us from the Littman Library, and we might dip into this, um, perhaps at the end, but Confronting D-Divine Rage: Sermons from the Warsaw Ghetto.

Their report focused on museums, on performance and theater, and in publishing.

So to talk about all of this today, I have the authors of the Jewish Currents Report, Josh Lambert, the Sophia Moses Robeson Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

Josh, thanks for being here.

It's great to be here.

And I study the publishing industry.

So these are all, I mean, it's really this particular problem.

And also I've been attending a Jewish studies reading group that Josh hosts because I've been moving closer to Jewish studies in my own scholarship.

So it's kind of like This was like right in the world of like exactly what I am thinking about, want to be thinking about.

I'm the Russell and Bettina Knapp Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University.

Um, I served on Columbia's antisemitism task force, ran its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, but my main interest is Jewish migration and understanding and looking at Jewish life in the last two centuries and how migration and movement changed it.

And indeed, this is the topic of my first book, which looks at Jews, uh, immigrant Jews' relationship to Eastern Europe, because 80% of Jews in America, for example, are descended from people from Eastern Europe.

But, you know, the genesis of this book is not that I have a deep love of banking, but I always take my classes on walking tours of the Lower East Side, because I want to bring them to a moment back in time when New York City served both as the East European Jewish immigrant capital of the world, indeed, more East European Jews lived there than anywhere else, but it is hard to avoid how it was also the financial capital of the United States.

Right.

Real service to people who can't get it elsewhere.

So actually stepping away from the book, but the, the question is related to the book, I wonder, um, if you could tell us a bit more about the field of economic history as it relates to Jewish studies in the US, so American Jewish economic history, and what you see as fruitful directions for the future.

And how can your book help, you know, people working in the field maybe ask new questions that have not been asked before?

I'm the Russell and Bettina Knapp Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University.

Um, I served on Columbia's antisemitism task force, ran its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, but my main interest is Jewish migration and understanding and looking at Jewish life in the last two centuries and how migration and movement changed it.

And indeed, this is the topic of my first book, which looks at Jews', uh, immigrant Jews' relationship to Eastern Europe, because 80% of Jews in America, for example, are descended from people from Eastern Europe.

But, you know, the genesis of this book is not that I have a deep love of banking, but I always take my classes on walking tours of the Lower East Side because I want to bring them to a moment back in time when New York City served both as the East European Jewish immigrant capital of the world, indeed, more East European Jews lived there than anywhere else, but it is hard to avoid how it was also the financial capital of the United States because the m- biggest building that still looms over all the other tenements on the Lower East Side, two blocks from the Tenement Museum, is Sender Jormilowski's bank.

I'm the Russell and Bettina Knapp Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University.

Um, I served on Columbia's Anti-Semitism Task Force, ran its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, but my main interest is Jewish migration and understanding and looking at Jewish life in the last two centuries and how migration and movement changed it.

And indeed, this is the topic of my first book, which looks at Jews, uh, immigrant Jews' relationship to Eastern Europe, because 80% of Jews in America, for example, are descended from people from Eastern Europe.

But, you know, the genesis of this book is not that I have a deep love of banking, but I always take my classes on walking tours of the Lower East Side, because I wanna bring them to a moment back in time when New York City served both as the East European Jewish immigrant capital of the world, indeed, more East European Jews lived there than anywhere else, but it is hard to avoid how it was also the financial capital of the United States, because the m- biggest building that still looms over all the other tenements on the Lower East Side, two blocks from the Tenement Museum, is Sender Jormilowski's bank.

Right.

Real service to people who can't get it elsewhere.

So actually stepping away from the book, but the c- the question is related to the book, I wonder, um, if you could tell us a bit more about the field of economic history as it relates to Jewish studies in the US, so American Jewish economic history, and what you see as fruitful directions for the future, and how can your book help, you know, people working in the field maybe ask new questions that have not been asked before?

So that's a great question.