Adventures in Jewish Studies Podcast

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, this episode explores the roles that Jews played in the American Revolution and the new world of opportunity that opened for them afterward. From merchants who financed and supplied the Patriot cause to the first Jew killed in the American Revolutionary War, guest scholars Jonathan Sarna, Michael Hoberman, and Abby Meyer, along with host Jeremy Shere, explore the lives of colonial Jewish communities.

In this episode, scholars and translators discuss Yiddish popular fiction known as "shund," serialized in Yiddish newspapers around the turn of the 20th century, and consider the gap between this popular, commercial literature and literary fiction. Guest scholars include Jessica Kirzane, Eddy Portnoy, Mikhl Yashinsky, and Saul Noam Zaritt with host Avishay Artsy.

Guest scholar James Loeffler looks at the different forms of anti-Zionism and its overlapping relationship with antisemitism, and considers how the past can remind us that it is possible to have a principled and logical critique against Zionism.

Guest scholar Pamela Nadell talks about antisemitism in America. She looks at how the definition of antisemitism has changed over time, how antisemitism has been always threaded throughout the American Jewish experience, and how this current moment is an explosion of something that had been lying fairly dormant.

Guest scholar Sara Lipton discusses antisemitism in medieval Europe. From the Nazis in the 20th century to current alt-right movements, many of history's and modernity's most prominent antisemitic groups have drawn on beliefs and motifs that first emerged during the Middle Ages. But conspiracies and caricatures didn't emerge overnight – they were a product of centuries-long shifts in political and religious dynamics.