History

Course

In these multi-media presentations, we deal with the following themes: Traditional rabbinic attitudes towards the Yiddish theatre; historic background and roots of the Yiddish theatre: the Purimshpiel; antecedents of American Yiddish theatre: Avrom Goldfaden and the Stabile Theatre in Yasi, Rumania; Shylock’s Daughter: Maurice Schwartz and Yiddish Art Theatre; Milieu, early enterprise, style and character of the Great Ones: Boris Thomashefsky, Jacob P. Adler, David Kessler; Shund: trashy themes of popular Yiddish theatre; Patriotten: profile of the Yiddish theatre audience; Stars of the musical comedy: Menashe Skulnik, Miriam Kressyn, Michael Michelescu, Molly Picon and Yitzchak Feld; attempts at Revival: Jacob Ben Ami and the Folksbieneh.

The Gold Rush Jews: A History of the Jews of San Francisco - 4 classes 

Who came, where did they come from, how did they get here, and why did they come?; communal and religious life of early San Francisco Jewry; profiles of pioneer Jewish magnates-in-the-making: Hellman, Sloss, Zellerbach; outstanding Jewish prizefighters, Joe Choynski and the Attelll trio of South of Market; the Lovable Loony: Joshua Abraham Norton, Emperor of the U.S. and Protector of Mexico; history of Congregation of Emanu-El; why gunslinger Wyatt Earp is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Colma; the Great San Francisco Earthquake and its impact on the Jewish community; prominent Jews of Oakland: Rabbi Judah L. Magnes and Gertrude Stein.

Birobidzhan: Stalin's Socialist Paradise for Jews in Siberia - 4 classes 

In 1934, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Region, popularly known as Birobidzhan, in a remote, sparsely populated region in the Soviet Far East. Designated as the national homeland of Soviet Jewry, Birobidzhan was part of the Kremlin's efforts to create an alternative to Palestine.
Some topics covered in these PowerPoint presentations:
Lenin, Stalin, the Nationalities Issues, and the Jewish Question; propaganda campaigns to settle Jews on the soil in the Crimea and Siberia; who settled in Birobidzhan?: Profiles of Jewish peasants who " tamed the Taiga" everyday life and culture in the JAR; a Jewish Alexander Solzenitzyn: Gulag memoirs of Birobidzhani writer Yisroel Emiot; other solutions to the " Jewish Problem": Stalin and the Doctors' Plot; demise, revival, and demise of Birobidzhan.

Livaks Among Cape Buffalos: A History of the Jews of South Africa - 4 classes

Earliest arrivals: Jews and the Dutch East Indies Co; The Litvak Diaspora in Johannesburg; South African Jews in the diamond trade; South African Chief Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz: His struggle for Jewish religious emancipation and against the Jewish white slave trade; "Undesirables": Antisemitism Afrikaner style; the Boer War and the shaping of South African Jewish loyalties; the apartheid system and the Jewish accommodation to South African race relations; rise of the Grey-shirts and their links with the Nazis; Jews in the struggle for democracy and human rights in South Africa; apartheid South Africa and its relationship with Israel; Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu: their relationships with South Africa Jewry and with Israel

• South African Jewry today

Among the topics covered: Servi Cameri: The Jew as Cash Cow in Medieval England

the Expulsion Decree of 1290; Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and the Jews; Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans and the Readmission (1656); Sephardi and Ashkenazi communal life in the 18th and 19th centuries; depiction of Jewish characters in Charles Dicken's

• Top-hats and Stiff Upper Lips: Biographical Sketches of Rothschild, Salomons and Montefiore
• The Meteoric Rise of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli 
• Yidn and Yehudim: The Mass Migration of Eastern European Jews to Great Britain (1880-1920)
• Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and the Rise of Pre-WWII English Fascism
• Winston Churchill and the Jews
• Profiles of outstanding British Chief Rabbis: Lord Immanuel Jacobovits and Lord Jonathan Sacks

The Jews of Weimar - 5 classes

In these multimedia presentations, we survey aspects of the social, political and cultural life of this dynamic German Jewish community during the very unstable period from the Republic's rise from the ashes of WWI to Hitler's catapulting to power.

Among the topics to be discussed: “The Jews stabbed us in the back!”:  Right-wing conspiracy theories on why Germany lost WWI; the assassination of foreign minister Walter Rathenau; the rise of pathological Judeophobia: Nazi propogandists Heinrich Class and Julius Streicher; Hitler's views on human biology and racial taxonomy, and the Jew as lethal pathogen; Martin Buber's neo-Chassidism and Cultural Zionism; Franz Rosenzweig and Lehrhaus Judaica; Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidigger and the banality of love between a Jew and a Nazi; the life and tragic death of intellectual Walter Benjamin; the Jews of Bauhaus; the world of Kurt Weil.