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The College Commons Podcast

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Sep 28, 2021 • 23min

Catherine Collomp: The Untold Story of Jewish Labor in the Fight Against Nazism

The Jewish Labor Committee’s rescue of European Jews and labor leaders in World War II. Catherine Collomp is Emerita professor at Université de Paris (formerly Université Paris-Diderot), France. A specialist of American history, she has taught at Université Paris XII Créteil (1985-1998) and Université Paris-Diderot ( 1998- 2008) where she specialized in American social and political history, with a special interest in labor and immigration history. Currently involved in projects to study Jewish-American responses to fascism and Nazism, her book "Rescue, Relief and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi operations, 1934-1945" was published in April 2021.
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Sep 13, 2021 • 35min

Dr. Joel Dimsdale: Brainwashing in History (and Today)

The history of coercive persuasion, from Pavlov to social media. Dr. Joel E. Dimsdale, M.D attended Carleton College and then Stanford University, where he obtained a MA in Sociology and an MD degree. He obtained psychiatric training at MGH and was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976-1985, when he moved to University of California, San Diego, where he is now Regent Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus. His clinical subspecialty is consultation psychiatry. He is a former career awardee of the American Heart Association and is past-president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychosomatic Society, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He is editor-in-chief emeritus of Psychosomatic Medicine and is a previous guest editor of Circulation and former editor-at-large of Journal Psychosomatic Research. He has been a consultant to the President’s Commission on Mental Health, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academies of Science, the Department of Justice, NASA, and NIH and was Advisor to the UC Regents Health Sciences Committee. He was a member of the DSM 5 taskforce and chaired the workgroup studying somatic symptom disorders. His research interests include stress physiology, ethnicity, and sleep. He is the author of more than 500 publications, including Anatomy of Malice: the enigma of the Nazi War Criminals, Yale University Press, 2016 and Dark Persuasion: the History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media, Yale University Press, 2021.
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Aug 31, 2021 • 25min

Max Gross: The Lost Shtetl

A modern-day Yiddish folktale in an alternative Jewish world, with much to consider for our own. The Lost Shtetl, winner of The Jewish Book Council's Miller Fam­i­ly Book Club Award. A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good. Born in New York City in 1978, Max Gross is the son of two writers. He attended Saint Ann's School and Dartmouth College and worked for 10 years at The New York Post before becoming Editor in Chief of Commercial Observer. He previously wrote a book about dating called "From Schlub to Stud" but has since been rescued from the single man's fate by his beloved wife and son. "The Lost Shtetl" is his first novel.
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Aug 17, 2021 • 19min

Lesléa Newman: Jewish Stories in Children's Books

The unique power of children's books in presenting diverse stories. "Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail," winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Children's Picture Book. Welcoming Elijah by celebrated author Lesléa Newman, unites a young boy and a stray kitten in a warm, lyrical story about Passover, family, and friendship. Lesléa (pronounced “Lez-LEE-uh”) Newman is the author of 75 books for readers of all ages, including A Letter to Harvey Milk; October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard; I Carry My Mother; The Boy Who Cried Fabulous; Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed; and Heather Has Two Mommies. She has received many literary awards, including creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two American Library Association Stonewall Honors, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Award, the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award, a Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fiction Writing grant, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, the Cat Writer’s Association Muse Medallion, and the Dog Writers Association of America’s Maxwell Medallion. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award Finalists. Ms. Newman wrote Heather Has Two Mommies, the first children’s book to portray lesbian families in a positive way, and has followed up this pioneering work with several more children’s books on lesbian and gay families: Felicia’s Favorite Story, Too Far Away to Touch, Saturday Is Pattyday, Mommy, Mama, and Me, and Daddy, Papa, and Me. She is also the author of many books for adults that deal with lesbian identity, Jewish identity and the intersection and collision between the two. Other topics Ms. Newman explores include AIDS, eating disorders, butch/femme relationships, and sexual abuse. Her award-winning short story, A Letter To Harvey Milk, has been made into a film and adapted for the stage.
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Jul 29, 2021 • 21min

Stefan Hertmans: The Convert

Reconstructing the tragic story of a medieval noblewoman who leaves her home and family for the love of a Jewish boy. The Convert, Finalist (Sephardic Culture), The National Jewish Book Award (2020) In this dazzling work of historical fiction, the Man Booker International–long-listed author of War and Turpentine reconstructs the tragic story of a medieval noblewoman who leaves her home and family for the love of a Jewish boy. In eleventh-century France, Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous Christian family, falls in love with David Todros, a rabbi’s son and yeshiva student. To be together, the couple must flee their city, and Vigdis must renounce her life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father’s knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe with the onset of the First Crusade. What begins as a story of forbidden love evolves into a globe-trotting trek spanning continents, as Vigdis undertakes an epic journey to Cairo and back, enduring the unimaginable in hopes of finding her lost children. Based on two fragments from the Cairo Genizah—a repository of more than three hundred thousand manuscripts and documents stored in the upper chamber of a synagogue in Old Cairo—Stefan Hertmans has pieced together a remarkable work of imagination, re-creating the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers whose steps he retraces almost a millennium later. Blending fact and fiction, and with immense imagination and stylistic ingenuity, Hertmans painstakingly depicts Vigdis’s terrible trials, bringing the Middle Ages to life and illuminating a chaotic world of love and hate. Ste­fan Hert­mans is an inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed Flem­ish author. For more than twen­ty years he was a pro­fes­sor at the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Fine Arts, Ghent, where he wrote nov­els, poems, essays, and plays. His pre­vi­ous book, War and Tur­pen­tine, was award­ed the pres­ti­gious AKO Lit­er­a­ture Prize in 2014.
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Jul 21, 2021 • 24min

Laura Leibman: Jewish History Renewed in the Experience of Women

Remarkable stories of Jewish women through the objects of their lives. The Art of the Jew­ish Fam­i­ly: A His­to­ry of Women in Ear­ly New York in Five Objects (Bard Grad­u­ate Cen­ter), winner of The National Jewish Book Award in three dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories: the Ger­rard and Ella Berman Memo­r­i­al Award for His­to­ry, the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Stud­ies Cel­e­brate 350 Award, and the Women Stud­ies Bar­bara Dobkin Award. In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives. Laura Arnold Leibman is a Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (USA) and the author of The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects (Bard Graduate Center, 2020) which won three National Jewish Book Awards. Her earlier book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) won a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and a National Jewish Book Award. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She has been a visiting fellow at Oxford University, a Fulbright scholar at the University of Utrecht, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Her forthcoming Once We Were Slaves (Oxford UP, 2021) is about an early multiracial Jewish family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean and became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.
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Jul 6, 2021 • 34min

Ariana Neumann: Secrets of Her Father’s Past

Piecing together family secrets & stories of bravery in Nazi Germany. "When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains," winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography and Memoir. In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew. Ariana Neumann was born and grew up in Venezuela. She has a BA in History and French Literature from Tufts University, an MA in Spanish and Latin American Literature from New York University and a PgDIP in Psychology of Religion from University of London. She previously was involved in publishing, worked as a foreign correspondent for Venezuela’s The Daily Journal and her writing has appeared in a variety of publications including The European, the Jewish Book Council and The New York Times. She currently lives in London with her husband, three children, a basset fauve de Bretagne, a border terrier and a rescue mutt. When Time Stopped is her first book.
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Jun 22, 2021 • 35min

Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps

What can Hebrew's usage in Jewish summer camps teach us about the American Jewish experience? "Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps" Winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award in Education and Jewish Identity Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture. Sharon Avni is Professor of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at BMCC at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is also a research affiliate at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis. Her current project funded by a Mellon/ACLS fellowship examines contemporary Modern Hebrew culture in the United States. Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (Los Angeles) and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. Her books include Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and creator of the Jewish Language Website and the Jewish English Lexicon. Jonathan Krasner holds the Jack, Joseph Morton Mandel Chair in Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish History from Brandeis in 2002. Jonathan is a two-time recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education (2011) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (2020).
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Jun 8, 2021 • 43min

The 2020 Pew Study: What does it mean to be Jewish in America?

Surprising statistics and lively analysis of the 2020 Pew Study results. Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (Los Angeles) and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Linguistics in 2004. Her books include Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Dr. Benor is founding co-editor of the Journal of Jewish Languages and creator of the Jewish Language Website and the Jewish English Lexicon. Bruce A. Phillips is Professor of Sociology and Jewish Communal Studies at Hebrew Union College, and University Fellow at Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is one of the leading researchers in the demography and sociology of American Jewry and is the 2017 recipient of the Marshall Sklare award for his contributions to this field. His current research focuses on Jewish interfaith marriage in the United States, Jewish adults who grew up in interfaith homes in the context of mixed-race research, Jewish residential patterns in metro areas including suburbanization and “ethnoburbs.”
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May 25, 2021 • 24min

Colum McCann: The Infinite Sides of Apeirogon

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, author Colum McCann discusses the power of storytelling as a bridge of humanity across seemingly intractable conflict. Colum McCann is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honours, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4, and he lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family. Photo by Richard Gilligan

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