The Digital Minhag Archive
Nathaniel Deutsch
Faculty Led Research
The Digital Minhag Archive, a crowd-sourced repository of contemporary Jewish practices (also known as minhagim in Hebrew) that will be housed on an interactive website. The core of the website will be a digitized bilingual (Yiddish-English) edition of “The Jewish Ethnographic Program,” (Yiddish, Dos Yidishe Etnografishe Program), a massive questionnaire that the ethnographer An-sky published in 1914 on the traditional Jewish life—and death— cycle in the Pale of Settlement, where 40% of the world’s Jewish population once lived and where a majority of American Jews have roots. The translation on the website first appeared in Nathaniel Deutsch’s book The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement, Harvard University Press, 2011, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in 2013. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047280
The 2087 questions in “The Jewish Ethnographic Program,” provide perhaps our best window onto how Jewish men, women, children, and old people in the Pale of Settlement and Poland actually experienced what it meant to be Jewish on the ground, in the most mundane, yet revealing ways. The Digital Minhag Archive will enable visitors to the website to create accounts and then answer part or all of the questionnaire based on their own Jewish practices or on those of their family or community. These responses will be stored and, over time, will constitute a living archive of Jewish practices both past and present. Funding from a Taube Foundation grant would support completion of the project, including building a community of users through social media.
Jewish Refugees in WWII North Africa
Alma Heckman
Alma Heckman, Neufeld-Levin Chair of Holocaust Studies and Assistant Professor in History and Jewish Studies, is currently digitizing and transcribing oral histories of two Jewish refugees who fled to North Africa during WWII.
The first, Mme Valentina Belova, fled Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and by circuitous route became a professional dancer in the Belgian Royal Ballet. When WWII struck, she and her husband found safe haven in Casablanca before ultimately transiting to the United States. Constance Kreemer, a dancer and dance historian in Santa Cruz, originally recorded the interviews with Mme Belova in the mid-1990s.
The second, Edie Kulstein, fled to Algeria from France during the beginning of the Nazi occupation and installation of the Vichy regime in France. She spent her teenage years in Algiers and ultimately worked as a secretary for the Allied forces, in which capacity she met her husband, and American Jew, ultimately bringing her to the United States. Heckman recorded a series of interviews with Edie Kulstein in 2016.
Memories/Motifs
Rachel Deblinger
Memories/Motifs explores representations of Holocaust survivors in the immediate postwar period. The exhibit, built in Scalar, traces three different survivors and the transformation of their stories in different media and for different political ends. Users can listen to postwar radio broadcasts about the Holocaust, watch fundraising videos, and see images from magazines and newspapers that introduced American audiences to the Holocaust in the wake of the war.
Deblinger also maintains a related Memories/Motifs blog that reflects on contemporary issues related to Holocaust memory.
Liminal Spaces & the Jewish Imagination
Murray Baumgarten, Venice Ghetto Working Group
An online publication on Medium.com that creates an expanded conversation from the Liminal Spaces and the Jewish Imagination Conference (February 18–19, 2015, UCSC). The Venice Ghetto Working Group at UCSC has undertaken the project of thinking through the meaning of the ghetto in the context of its 500th anniversary.
Details about the conference and audio recordings from presentations are available here.
Entering Cartographies: Meditations on Travel
Katharine G. Trostel, Ursuline College
Affiliated Projects
This digital mapping project, centered on Marjorie Agosín’s Cartographies: Meditations on Travel (2004), stems from larger questions posed by the Venice Ghetto Working Group at UCSC. Through digital mapping, Trostel traces the complexity of ways in which Jewish spaces, including that of the ghetto, are revisited, re-inscribed, entangled, and recycled in Agosín’s poems, as she simultaneously works through her experience of exile in the period of the Chilean post-dictatorship. The space of the ghetto, as well as globalized Jewish spaces as a broader category, are ways of thinking through the more expansive themes of exile, displacement, national belonging, and exclusion.
Through her prose-poems, Agosín complicates the idea of a static geography, weaving personal place-based memories into a complex web of Jewish sites of global significance. Reflecting upon her travels across four continents, she explores both the category of exile and a certain longing for home. This work re-inscribes the meanings of place, and considers how sites of memory can come to embody overlapping stories that span both space and time. She questions: How do these sites of memory travel? How can a digital representation of literary space help to visualize and make deeper the layers of history and tangled webs of place-based belonging encoded in the pages of Agosín’s text?
The Center for Jewish Studies at UCSC is excited to partner on digital projects. These projects are emerging collaborations and serve as examples of what Digital Jewish Studies can look like.
Collaborative Projects +
Partnerships
Mapping Jewish San Francisco
Mapping Jewish San Francisco is a new digital humanities project of the Swig Program in Jewish Studies and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. The project takes a collaborative approach to examining the complex history and unique religious, cultural, and political identity of Jewish San Francisco. Top scholars and experts—including university faculty, graduate students, and community leaders—will contribute exhibitions to tell stories of the individuals and institutions that comprise the Jewish San Francisco Bay Area. Along with our partners, including other academic institutions, libraries, archives, and leading Jewish institutions, Mapping Jewish San Francisco aims to bring the past to life and make it possible to visually travel back in time to explore the rich Jewish history of the Bay Area. Mapping Jewish San Francisco is based on and in partnership with Mapping Jewish LA at UCLA.