Jenna Weissman Joselit, the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at the George Washington University, is a distinguished historian of the American Jewish experience and a former columnist for the Forward.
Jenna Weissman Joselit
By Jenna Weissman Joselit
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Culture How a 1976 Exhibit Changed the Way We Think About Jewish History
We don’t often think of ideas and concepts as having a biography or, better yet, a pedigree or yikhes. But like people, they also partake of the life cycle: Ideas, too, come from somewhere before going out on their own. And so it is with the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which recently…
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The Schmooze Jewish Sports Is Not an Oxymoron
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree I try to follow and keep abreast of a lot of things: the news, for starters, as well as fashion and film and arts and culture. But I give baseball and basketball, much less soccer, a pass. You will rarely, if ever, catch me reading the sports section of…
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Culture Playing Jewish Geography From California to the New York Islands
At one point or another, most of us have undoubtedly played “Jewish Geography.” The Jewish equivalent of “six degrees of separation,” the term refers to the kinship ties and social structures that bind one Jew to another. “Jewish Geography” is how we locate ourselves. It’s our very own GPS. But “Jewish Geography” isn’t just a…
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The Schmooze How Clothes Make Us Modern
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree One of the most exciting — certainly among the most crowded — of exhibitions in New York at the moment is the Met’s “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity.” And for good reason. Training its sights on the triangulated relationship among these three mighty cultural forces of the late 19th century,…
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The Schmooze Pesach Extends Its Shelf Life
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree What’s striking about the holiday of Pesach isn’t its historicity so much as its contemporaneity. There, I’ve said it. You would think that I would be most quick to praise the festival’s biblical origins, the ninth-century roots of the haggadah, or, at the very least, great grandma’s Depression-era dishes….
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Culture Let’s Discriminate Against All The Jewish Lawyers
No one, not even the mightiest of institutions, is immune to the changes wrought by globalization, digitalization and a weakened economy. Still, I was surprised to learn recently that law schools have been particularly hard hit — so much so that they have begun to rethink the very nature of legal education and its relationship…
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The Schmooze Hasidic and In Style
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree This past week New York had its knickers in a twist when fashion designer John Galliano was spotted wearing an ensemble and sporting a hairdo that, at first blush, summoned up the external appearance of the Hasidim: oversized black hat, long black frockcoat, black knickers and payes. Some cried…
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News Turning the Key to the Great Houses of Lox
On Sunday mornings, New Yorkers can be found lining up in droves to purchase their weekly allotment of smoked salmon. They cluster in front of the fish counter at Russ & Daughters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and at Zabar’s on the Upper West Side, or at newcomer Shelsky’s Smoked Fish in Brooklyn, where they…
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In Case You Missed It
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Yiddish כ׳בענק נאָך די סעקולערע ייִדן פֿון אַמאָלLonging for the way secular Jews used to be
מײַן פֿעטער האָט נישט געהיט שבת אָדער כּשרות אָבער ווען ער האָט אָפּגעריכט דעם סדר האָט ער געקלונגען ווי אַ פֿרומער ייִד.
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Fast Forward Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
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Yiddish פֿינעף פֿאַקטן וועגן פּסח וואָס איר ווייסט אפֿשר נישט Five facts about Passover you may not know
דאָס רייכערן פּאַפּיראָסן יום־טובֿ האָט צונויפֿגעבראַכט מענטשן
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Culture A brilliant Jewish storyteller may be gone, but her characters are ‘still talking’
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