Before eugenics became infamous, the movement to select and control human reproduction "to suppress defective classes" was popular among American liberals and progressives — including Jews. Graduate fellow Ari Forsyth explains.
Dr. Alan Dowty analyzes various aspects of Israel's past and present to determine that it is not a settler colonial state, at least not by the usual definition.
Ph.D. candidate Katja Schatte explains how ideas of Jewishness gradually expanded in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) starting in the mid-1980s.
Graduate fellow Ben Lee explains how machine learning can help historians to learn from the photographs, illustrations and advertisements found in Ladino-language newspapers.
Concern over a shrinking population led Ottoman authorities to undermine reproductive autonomy in the 19th century, writes grad fellow Büşra Demirkol, starting with outlawing abortion and exiling two "bloody" Jewish midwives.
Present-day discussions of anti-Semitism often involve Israel and the Zionist movement… but before the 20th century, Jews’ and Jewish scholars’ understandings of anti-Semitism were completely connected with Europe and Christianity. In the last episode of our series, guest Liora R. Halperin looks at how 19th-century Jewish settlers to Ottoman Palestine were influenced by the anti-Semitism they experienced in the Russian Empire
Can Jews be anti-Semitic against other Jews? In this episode, guest Devin E. Naar looks at the history of Jewish prejudice against other Jews in the United States, from the very first American Jewish settlers in the 1600s to twentieth-century efforts to exclude Jews from the Muslim world from Jewish institutions — as American Jews struggled to hold on to their “precarious whiteness.”
Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time? In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo helps to answer these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and “conversos” (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, exploring how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents.
