Northeastern’s pre-Passover events included a presentation by award-winning writer Nathan Englander. Englander spoke powerfully, emphasizing that his stories, steeped though they are in his own Jewish experiences, are not Jewish stories, per se; although he writes about Jews in his fiction, he is writing about “people.”  Englander, whose accomplishments include a new translation of the Haggadah, also talked about his years living in Israel and their contribution to his ways of thinking.

We have also been enhancing the Jewish Studies program with more opportunities to study contemporary Israel.  I have been on a faculty search committee to hire a Professor of Israel Studies, and we hope to complete that process this spring.  We have also been energetically engaged in planning the details of our Dialogue of Civilization summer study abroad program to Israel.  I will accompany fourteen Northeastern students from May 19-June 20, offering two courses under the rubric “The Complexities of Contemporary Israel.” One course will be taught by an Israeli political scientist; I will teach about the representation of Israel in Israeli literature and art.  We will integrate our studies with tours, visiting lectures, and experiential learning. The students range from freshmen to graduating seniors; some major in International Affairs, others in Journalism, still others in Human Services and many other departments.  Their personal backgrounds are also widely varied.  In support of the Dialogue’s bringing students to Israel to learn, we received a $14,000 grant from MASA—a program of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government—which is giving these awards for the first time to student groups that include non-Jewish participants.

Annually, Northeastern offers a week of programs that commemorate the Holocaust, and we invite the larger community to think seriously about what lessons we must draw for our own historical moment.  As you will read in this issue of Haverim, a highlight of the week will be literary critic Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the monumental memoir The Lost:  The Search for Six of Six Million.  Mendelsohn will speak in particular about how the stories of the Holocaust will necessarily change in the hands of rising generations.

In this issue of Haverim, you will read about student projects and a fascinating range of accomplishments by our colleagues in Jewish Studies at Northeastern, again in a range of fields.  I have come to know students of Jewish Studies who have loved the texts and traditions of Judaism all of their lives and now seek an academic appreciation of Judaism.  Others come to the subject from a cultural distance, curious about this ancient, continuous, influential religious and cultural tradition; sometimes they are so excited by what they discover that they minor in Jewish Studies.  Others return from Northeastern’s Birthright trip determined to discover the rest of their birthright:  Judaism and Jewish culture.  My colleagues and I are continually challenged to re-describe the importance of Jewish Studies to a well-rounded liberal arts education.

What is the importance of Jewish Studies to a well-rounded education? Collaborating with University of Colorado Professor David Shneer on a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities this spring, we wrote:  “Although Jews are a small minority population (currently 0.2% worldwide), it is significant that most prominent universities offer Jewish Studies because familiarity with the world’s oldest monotheistic religion is presumed necessary for cultural literacy and to understanding those cultures that Judaism has influenced.  The Jewish experience is characterized by cultural and ethnic diversity reflected in a wide range of expressions of music, art, and literature.  The defining aspects of Jewish identity (religion, ethnicity, history, culture, nationality) are critical categories to understanding today’s complex and diverse societies.  Jewish Studies introduces students not only to theories behind these concepts but also to how they shape everyday lives.  In Jewish Studies classes, students explore subjects such as identity, assimilation, culture, religion, and social justice, and they acquire tools and knowledge for a more critical and analytical understanding of the religious and secular world around them.”

Jewish Studies at Northeastern is a vibrant and expanding program with ever-widening reach and programs that increasingly draw participation from beyond the campus.  We are especially grateful to Betty Brudnick and The Ruderman Family Foundation, each of whom has funded student merit scholarships for Jewish Studies students.  The competition for these $5000 awards draws attention to our program and motivates interested students to declare the minor or major and refine their interests.  The Ruderman Family Foundation has also supported the lectureship that brought Art Spiegelman to campus last year and Nathan Englander this year.  These high-profile events showcase our program and enable us to better cultivate fruitful relationships with colleagues and friends.

Thank you for your interest in Jewish Studies at Northeastern.  It is humbling and thrilling to play a role in gifting students with an appreciation of the incomparable history, culture, and religion of the Jewish people.

That afternoon at 5 p.m., noted essayist, critic, and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn will deliver the 21^st Annual Robert Salomon Morton lecture, “’Lost’ Between Memory and History:  Writing the Holocaust for the Next Generation.”  Mendelsohn is perhaps best known as the author of the international bestseller The Lost:  A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), the story of his worldwide search for information about the fates of relatives who perished in the Holocaust.  In this lecture, he will explore the evolving meaning of the Holocaust as both a historical and a literary event.  His important talk comes at a critical moment as this history passes to a new generation of writers and readers.  He asks:  Does the injunction to “never forget” put us at risk of “forgetting” individual stories as they are reshaped into the large manageable parables cultures need to live by?

On Tuesday April 9 at 12 p.m., author and journalist Matthew Brzezinski will speak on “Heroism in the Holocaust,” based on his recently published book Isaac’s Army (a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award), about Jewish resistance in Poland and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  This talk will discuss the myth of passivity during the Holocaust by showing that resistance was far more widespread than is generally acknowledged.  He will talk about the different forms that resistance took and how extraordinarily difficult it was for Jews to resist in an organized manner, as compared to other groups in occupied Europe.  He will also address how in some cases, not resisting was the ultimate act of courage.

On Wednesday April 10 at 12 p.m., the film “From Swastika to Jim Crow” will be screened as part of the Bill Giessen Film Series.  The film is a mesmerizing chronicle of Jim Crow America and a profoundly moving tale of two seemingly different groups – the formal, heavily accented European scholars and their young Southern black students – who enriched each others’ lives in ways still being felt today.  A panel discussion following the film will be moderated by Professor Jim Ross and will feature Margaret Burnham, Professor of Law, Charissa Threat, Assistant Professor of History, and Laurel Leff, Associate Professor of Journalism and Stotsky Professor of Jewish Historical and Cultural Studies.

The week will conclude on Thursday April 11 at 10:30 a.m. with a talk by Stephan Lewy, part of the Philip N. Backstrom, Jr., Survivor Lecture Series.  Berlin-born Stephen Lewy was just seven years old when the Nazis took power in Germany. He spent the next nine years suffering discrimination, displacement, and abandonment. His Jewish father struggled to make a living and stay alive under constant threat of imprisonment in a concentration camp. His mother’s Protestant family disowned him after her death. Lewy barely survived Kristallnacht, as he was locked in a synagogue with 100 other Jewish children. He escaped to France with a children’s transport, a step ahead of the German invasion. He hid in various places in France until finally securing a visa to the United States in 1942. Lewy returned to Europe as an American soldier 10 days after D-Day and witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Years later, Lewy attended night school at Northeastern University, earning a degree in accounting.

All of these events are free and open to the public.  For more information, including how to RSVP for the breakfast, please visit http://www.northeastern.edu/jewishstudies/events/.

Delightfully, Professor Brown has a completely different area of expertise as well:  he is a leading scholar on the Jewish experience in the Catskill Mountains resort area, director of The Catskills Institute:  An Organization to Promote Research and Education on the Significance of the Catskill Mountains for Jewish-American Life, author of Catskill Culture:   A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area, and editor of In the Catskills:  A Century of the Jewish Experience in “The Mountains.”

Mention the Catskills to Jewish young people today and you might get a blank stare.  Yet for decades in the mid-20^th century, the area served as a central locus for American Jewish culture.  Early in the century, a number of Jewish immigrants had bought land and attempted to farm in the area.  Struggling to make a living as farmers, they sensed a new opportunity as New Yorkers increasingly flocked to the area on vacation in search of fresh air, good food, and leisure opportunities.  The hotels they opened catered especially to Jews, to whom many prominent resorts were off-limits because of anti-Semitism. Particularly between the 1920s and the 1960s, middle- and working-class New York Jews came in droves to the “Borscht Belt’s” hundreds of hotels, boarding houses, and bungalow colonies.  The Catskills Institute’s website lists 1,172 hotels and 849 bungalow colonies, many of which were owned and frequented by Jews, especially Ashkenazi immigrants and their children and grandchildren.  By the 1950s, approximately a half-million people were visiting each summer.

Among them were Phil Brown and his family.  “I grew up in a family of ‘Mountain Rats,’ a Catskills term for those who lived and worked in ‘The Mountains’ over many years,” Brown remarks.  “I spent three months each year in the Catskills, from birth in 1949 to 1971, and returned through the late 1970s to visit my parents who were still working there.  (My father died in his coffee shop there in 1972, and my mother was a chef until 1978.)  My parents began in 1946 as owners of a small hotel, Brown’s Hotel Royal, which they had until 1952.”

As the Catskills Institute website notes, the Catskills’ Jewish resorts shaped both American and American Jewish culture.  In their parallel world of Jewish bungalow colonies, summer camps, and small hotels, Jews became more American by participating in American forms of recreation and leisure, while young people met future spouses and promoted Jewish upward mobility by earning money for college.  At the same time, the Catskills introduced Americans to immigrant Jewish culture, especially through the Borscht Belt’s many comedians, musicians, and performers.  As air travel increased in the 1970s and many American Jews became less interested in vacationing in Jewish milieus, the Catskills began to decline.  Today, only a few resorts remain.

In 1991, long after the Catskills’ heyday, a friend suggested to Brown that his Catskills stories would provide great material for a book.  “Then my mother died two months later,” Brown remembers, “leaving me an orphan, whose subsequent search for roots became also a search for the meaning of the Catskills which had been so important in my life.”  In 1993, he visited the many places he and his parents had worked and began writing what would become Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories of the Great Jewish Resort Area.  Two years later, he joined with a few other Catskills veterans to hold what they believed would be a single conference on the history of the Catskills, in Woodridge, NY, on Labor Day Weekend 1995.  Exhilarated by the conference’s success, the group founded the Catskills Institute, which went on to hold thirteen more conferences (ending only five years ago), develop the world’s largest collection of Catskills materials, and serve as a resource for students, scholars, and ordinary people seeking information and graphic material.  As the population that enjoyed the Catskills grows old, the Catskills Institute is working to preserve the legacy of this important Jewish-American cultural phenomenon.

Brown is currently working on a multi-faceted book entitled Summer Haven:  The Catskills, the Holocaust, and the Literary Imagination, with Dr. Holli Levitsky, director of the Jewish Studies Program at Loyola Marymount University.  “The book contains excerpts from both new and existing writing that explores how vacationers, resort owners, and workers dealt with a horrific contradiction – the pleasure of their summer haven over against the mass extermination of Jews throughout Europe,” he explains; among the writers included are Art Spiegelman, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ezra Cappell, and Michael Berenbaum.  The book explores further how Holocaust survivors in the Catskills found connection, resolution to conflict, and avenues to come together despite the differences that set them apart.  Brown and Levitsky are also conducting original research to examine aspects of the Catskills Holocaust experience, including the role of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in sending immigrants to the Catskills as a safe place with good jobs, the creation of bungalow colonies with survivors, and the efforts to support the creation and early years of Israel as a counter to the Holocaust.

To learn more about the history of the Catskills and view thousands of fascinating documents and images, please view the Catskills Institute’s rich website at http://catskills.brown.edu/index.shtml.

Anna entered Northeastern in the fall of 2011 as a Music Industry major.  She quickly realized, however, that her personal and professional interests drew her in a different direction, and by the spring of 2012 she had switched her major to Jewish Studies and Religion.  “My first year of college, I struggled being away from [my] temple community,” she remembers.  “The more I missed it, the more I realized it was not just my friends that I missed, but learning about my religion.  There is so much to know about Jewish religion, culture, and history, and I felt as though I had only uncovered a very small piece of that knowledge.”

Since then, Anna has explored Judaism and the Jewish experience through a number of courses:  Jewish Religion and Culture (the gateway course to the major and minor), American Jewish History, and Hebrew 1.  She is currently enrolled in Hebrew 2, Jews and American Popular Culture, and Music of the Jewish People, and is looking forward to studying in Israel this summer with Jewish Studies’ new Dialogue of Civilizations program to Israel.

Although Anna does not yet know exactly what kind of a job she will pursue, she is deeply committed to a professional career within the Jewish community.  “The people at my temple inspire me to be the greatest person that I can be, which is why I know that my days should be spent working for this community,” she writes.  “I used to think that remaining involved at temple would be enough, but now I know that my studies and career belong there as well.”  She is interested in exploring the rabbinate, religious school administration, or the executive director position; ideally, a co-op position in the next year or two will provide her with greater exposure to these arenas.  “I want to spend my days and nights at the temple because being there has a way of bringing me inner peace,” she comments.  “I want to make my ‘inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement,’ and I truly believe that I have the best chance at doing so in the Jewish community.”

Heather Viola

Heather Viola, an International Affairs and Human Services major and Jewish Studies minor who is also this year’s Gideon Klein Scholar, is conducting research in conjunction with her Gideon Klein project.  A devoted vocalist who sings with The Northeastern University Choral Society and Chamber Choir and the Zamir Chorale of Boston, Heather is exploring the experience of the Terezin concentration camp through the lens of children’s music – children’s folksongs, choirs, operas, lullabies, etc.  She has interviewed Terezin survivors in the United States and the Czech Republic, toured Terezin itself, and conducted extensive research.  On April 8, Heather will present her research and perform children’s music at the Northeastern Holocaust Commemoration.

Margolit Sands

Margolit Sands, an Environmental Science major minoring in both Jewish Studies and Environmental Studies and recipient of the 2011-2012 Ruderman Scholarship in Jewish Studies, has focused this semester on agricultural halakhah, or Jewish law relating to agriculture and how it encourages or develops sustainable agriculture techniques.  In March, she participated in a service-learning Alternative Spring Break program in New Orleans run by The Jewish Farm School, taking part in sustainable agriculture projects, learning about food justice, and engaging in relevant Jewish text study.

Michael Silverman

Michael Silverman, an Engineering major and Jewish Studies minor and recipient of the 2012-2013 Ruderman Scholarship in Jewish Studies, is taking this opportunity to explore halakhic (Jewish legal) discussions of why the use of electricity is forbidden on the Sabbath.  He has shared with the class a variety of legal arguments on the topic, highlighting the diversity of opinions present among Jewish legal scholars throughout the ages.

Jacob Thaler

Jacob Thaler, a Political Science major and Jewish Studies minor, is interested in the nature of the Jewish identity of Jewish Supreme Court justices.  This semester, he is focusing on Louis Brandeis, the nation’s first Jewish Justice, who was raised in a highly assimilated family but eventually became the leading spokesperson for American Zionism.  Through an examination of Brandeis’s biography, Jack is exploring whether or not Brandeis’s Jewish identity influenced his jurisprudence.

Working with Prof. Laurel Leff, author of Buried By the Times:  The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, Janine Shub – a Journalism major and Jewish Studies minor – is examining media coverage of the Holocaust.  Her research has led her to address complicated questions of journalistic ethics and the realities of anti-Semitism in 1940s America.

Chloe Sakhaie is working towards a degree in Psychology and Education, with a minor in Jewish Studies.  She is bringing these interests together through the creation of a unit plan designed to teach older elementary school students about the Holocaust, especially in urban schools where knowledge of the Holocaust is often lacking.  Teaching the Holocaust at the elementary school level is controversial, and Chloe is working hard to create effective lessons that inform without traumatizing.  She is crafting approximately 10 lessons on the Holocaust, including studying Lois Lowry’s powerful young adult novel, Number the Stars.

Jessica Burke has been integrating Jewish Studies with her Psychology major through a study of the children of Holocaust survivors and the ways in which trauma may be “inherited” by subsequent generations.   Through research and interviews, Jessica is learning that families continue to experience the reverberations of traumatic experiences and that the particular experiences of survivors have an ongoing impact in the lives of their children and grandchildren.

At evening meetings over snacks, the students plan their presentations and support one another in their independent research.  The group also discussed short stories by Nathan Englander and excerpts from the work of Daniel Mendelsohn, in advance of the visits to campus of these renowned speakers.  Professors Lefkovitz and Sartori both participate in these meetings and enjoy the satisfaction of seeing students who have advanced through the program demonstrate their competencies, learn from one another, and integrate the study of Judaism with such a wide range of academic pursuits.

Jack Levin had two new books published in 2012 —  Blurring the Boundaries:  The Declining Significance of Age (Routledge) and, with J. Fox, a second edition of Extreme Killing:  Understanding Serial and Mass Murder (Fine Forge Press) – as well as a chapter entitled “School Rampage in International Perspective:  The Salience of Cumulative Strain Theory” in School Shootings as a Topic of Research: International Results, Case Studies and Concepts for Prevention (Springer).  On March 18, he served as keynote speaker at the Hate Studies Conference in Spokane, WA.  In July, he and Gordana Rabrenovic will be panelists at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology in Herzliya, Israel.

Willliam Miles’ new book, Jews of Nigeria:  An Afro-Judaic Odyssey, was recently the topic of two National Public Radio (NPR) broadcasts:  “Here and Now” with Sacha Pfeiffer and “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin. Miles has also been accepted into the 2013 Schusterman Summer Institute for Israel Studies, for college faculty, at Brandeis University.

Since April 2011, Stephen Sadow has been exhibiting and giving lectures on a series of 14 handmade artist’s books, each containing a poem from a Latin American Jewish poet, the translation of the poem into English, and a unique, original artwork inspired by the poem and done by a Latin American Jewish artist.  He has done presentations at the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Northeastern University, Arizona State University, University of Denver, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Emmanuel College, the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, The Jewish Community of Mexico City, Mexico, and the Argentine Consulate in New York. He has been invited to speak next fall at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the University of Texas at Austin.  He has created a number of impressive websites featuring the work of Latin American artists and writers, including “Jewish Latin American Art,” which contains over 1.100 artworks by 139 Jewish artists from 11 Latin American countries; “A Voice among the Multitudes,” a bilingual anthology of poetry by 13 Latin American Jewish poets, in the original Spanish and in English translations; “Identity and Diversity: Artist’s Book,” the art catalog of the 14 handmade artists’ books; and “Contemporary Jewish Latin American Literature and Culture,” a huge anthology of Jewish poetry and narrative from all over Latin America and beyond.  He is now working on yet another website that will feature the filmed interviews he has done with Latin American Jewish writers and artists.

Jennifer Sartori  has continued her research on adoption and Jewish identity in North America as co-director, with Dr. Jayne Guberman, of the Adoption and Jewish Identity Project.  Working with a consultant, Guberman and Sartori are completing the analysis of an online survey of Jewish adoptive parents, to which close to 1,000 people responded; the survey data is yielding a fascinating portrait of the changes in the characteristics and experiences of Jewish adoptive families over the past few decades.  They have also obtained Institutional Review Board approval for the second phase of the project, in which they will gather the voices of young adult adoptees (ages 18 to 36) who were raised in Jewish families.  (If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact Sartori at j.sartori@neu.edu.)  Sartori also served as an invited speaker on a keynote panel on religion at the Adoption Initiative’s 7^th Annual conference, “Best Interests of the Child?  Race, Religion, and Rescue in Adoption,” and spoke on “Revolutions in Adoption:  Jewish Families in an Age of Transnational, Transracial, and Open Adoption” at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s Center for Jewish Culture.

Harvey Shapiro has had a very busy and productive year.  In December 2012, his book Educational theory and Jewish studies in conversation:  From Volozhin to Bucascz was published by Lexington Books.  The book brings together two different fields of study – modern Jewish studies and contemporary educational theory – to provide new theoretical frameworks for their interaction and has received outstanding early reviews.  Shapiro also published “Revisiting deconstructive pedagogy:  Testifying to iterability ‘at once, aussi sec’ in Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook (2012) and has three forthcoming articles this Spring:  “Theories of conversation between education and Jewish studies” (Journal of Jewish Education), “Paradigmatic pedagogy in the philosophy of Georgio Agamben” (Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook), and, with Jacob Meskin, “’To give an example is complex act’:  Agamben’s pedagogy of the paradigm” (Educational Philosophy and Theory).  He has also been presenting his work at numerous academic conferences.