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.
How did the progressive Weimar Republic give way to the genocidal Nazi regime… and could it happen here? In this episode, guest Laurie Marhoefer explains the rise of the Nazi party in one of the most progressive places in the world, detailing the swift and dramatic shift in government, efforts to resist, and troubling echoes of these events in the present day.
"Jewish Questions" explores anti-Semitism: what it is, its long history, and how we can push back against it today.
The United States was the country where Jews came to finally be free from anti-Semitism… or was it? In this episode, guest Susan A. Glenn discusses the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., touching on the Second Ku Klux Klan, the “mother of all conspiracy theories,” and the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the U.S. in the present day.
Doctoral student Emily Gade discusses her research on radicalization and resiliency against violence, highlighting the work of the Israeli recovery organization ZAKA.
Doctoral student Oded Oron discusses the plight of African migrants in the state of Israel.
