Updated 2/26/25
The Jewish Policemen’s Statements: In Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a new paper looks at the accounts of Jewish policemen. Their fraught positions Warsaw and Otwock Ghettos, and their omissions in their statements shine a new light on an underexamined Jewish role during the Holocaust. [12/2/25]
Place Making: In the Journal of Jewish Education, Michal Muszkat Barkan explores how Jewish and Palestinian teachers in a Jerusalem professional development program interpret place. [11/6/25]
Antisemitism & Public Health:
New research from the American Psychiatry Association finds Jewish participants exhibited significant increases in depression and anxiety following the October 7, 2023 attack. Report co-author Leah Hibel suggests a national public health response. [11/18/25]
Rainbow Connection: In Jewish Culture and History, Teresa Bernheimer explores how discussions of the rainbow traverse centuries and cross boundaries of language, genre, and religious tradition. [11/5/25]
Back in the USSR: A new article in Holocaust and Genocide Studies explores the wartime and postwar experiences of some of the Polish Jews who remained in one of the Soviet republics. [11/3/25]
Nu Narratives: The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies offers an analysis of Thane Rosenbaum’s novels Second Hand Smoke and The Golems of Gotham, second-generation Holocaust narratives that reframe the collective memory of the Holocaust to include its aftermath on the later generations. [10/20/25]
Underground Couriers: The East European Jewish Affairs posted a few new articles this month, including one on the role of the Kashariyot (female couriers) in Poland’s ghetto undergrounds during the Holocaust. [10/16/25]
Mapping the Holocaust: Two interesting mapping projects were published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies this month. “Expanding Holocaust Cartography: Memory Maps as Testimonies” focuses on maps of victims of the Treblinka death camp and the hand-drawn maps appearing in postwar memorial books to highlight maps’ ambiguous standing as archival sources, as well as the unique histories they communicate. “Mapping the Emotional Landscapes of the Holocaust: Visualizing Space and Place in Survivor Trajectories” explores experiments with more multifaceted mapping of Holocaust space and place to include the emotional dimensions of spatial experience. [10/10/25]
Renaissance Mensch: Jewish Culture and History published “Jacob Marcaria: A Jewish Printer in Renaissance Italy.” Marcaria was a member of the rabbinical court in Venice, a physician, a matchmaker, and an intellectual personality of the time. [10/6/25]
Assessing Assumptions: In the Journal of Jewish Education Esther S. Friedman examines a professional development initiative designed to help Tanakh teachers surface and reflect on their assumptions about students’ beliefs. [10/2/25]
Blood Libel Histories: Through the work of Hungarian graphic artist János Major and its reception, this article in Eastern European Jewish Affairs explores the significance of a sexual element in blood libel histories through an examination of the prejudices connected to the Jewish male body and the ways Jewish topics were present or absent in socialist Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s. [9/17/25]
QR: The Summer Jewish Quarterly Review dropped with a heady mix of articles on Jewish male head coverings, Babylonian texts, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Politics of Hope. [8/1/25]
Gender Dynamics: Also from Brandeis is a study, Gender Dynamics and Engagement in Jewish Life, exploring “disparities in Jewish religious and community engagement.” Turns out in most communities, Jewish women tend to be more involved in Jewish life, but this likely says more about “larger sociological factors” in America than it does about Judaism or Jewish life in America. [7/28/25]
Ideology in the Classroom: Brandeis researchers explore how faculty at US universities think about contentious political issues and how these issues are addressed in the classroom. The results run contrary to the notion that universities are bastions of far-left ideological indoctrination and faculty-driven antisemitism. [7/22/25]
Finances and College: Brandeis’ Cohen Center released Financial Insecurity and College Success Among Jewish Young Adults, finding that financial insecurity wasn’t a barrier to attending and graduating college, but it did adversely impact the quality of life of Jewish college students.
[7/8/25]
