Episode 412: Making Mel Brooks Proud: Judaism

Transcript! (because accessibility is mandatory)

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes! (because citations are political)

More HISTORY OF THE WORLD (RELIGIONS), Part 1 coming for you! On this episode, we talk Judaism and making Mel Brooks proud, and to our great good fortune, we are joined by the one and only Dr. Shari Rabin.

The 101! (in which we did the professor-work)

Doesn’t Ilyse talk about Jews and Jewishness all the time?

Sort of! In seasons 1-3, when we did Primary Sources, Ilyse often referenced Judaism, since she is famously Jewish herself. But as far as an academic treatment of Judaism? Directly? No, no we have not.

In this episode, we talked about Judaism, because the world religions paradigm loves Judaism, but that love doesn’t really translate to good things for Jews.

Same basic lesson plan as always this season: knowing that religion is imperial helps us understand why Judaism so often gets portrayed as white and is only really part of the Big 5 World Religions in the world religions paradigm because of how Christians imagine Judaism relative to Christianity. And, as always, religious literacy requires us to know not just that Judaism exists in multiple forms and for multiple populations, but that Jewish practices can be and are liberatory for its practitioners, Judaism exists without Christianity, despite often being lumped in (sometimes subtly and other times not, like in “Judeo-Christian”).

In short, we’re arguing this episode that Judaism is an interesting case study to think about privilege and position in the world religions model, Jews are diverse and interesting, and you likely don’t know about that diversity because, despite having such a prominent slot in this silly model, Judaism isn’t there because of its own merits—nah, it’s there because of its relationship to Christianity. To do so, we talked about the wide variety of Jewish people, stressing that even though we imagine Judaism as Eastern European, or perhaps Israeli, or maybe American, Jews have called all sorts of places home, have had real cultural impacts in those places, and do not all neatly fit into a bagels and nosh cultural imaginary. There’s more to Jews than Yiddisher shtick, even if that’s what Ilyse leans into!

Guest Expert! (because together we are a genius)

Dr. Shari Rabin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion at Oberlin College. She works on Judaism in the US, perhaps especially in the American South.

Dr. Rabin is a scholar of modern Judaism and American religions, which makes her a perfect guest for today’s episode. Her work centers on how religion has been shaped by the complexities of space and place, as well as Jews, religion, and race in the US South. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in 19th America (New York University Press, 2017), is assigned for homework (see below) and was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies. She is also a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship winner this year (2021-2022).

She is a prolific and impressive scholar—we’re so honored she lent her voice to our lil’ punk rock pod.

Little Bit Leave It! (in which we leave you a little bit to remember)

Megan wants to remind you—yes, you—that antisemitism is real and Nazis are bad, even if Ilyse disallowed us to center anti-Jewish hate in this episode (because Jews are not only useful or interesting due to their oppressions). 

Ilyse wants to leave with you this, too: the things she did not say. Judaism is more than Nazi persecution, more than the Inquisition, and way more than the nation-state of Israel. She purposefully wrote this episode ignoring all those things—because reducing Judaism to the experiences of antisemitism or the 75-year-old nation-state of Israel is, in fact, antisemitic.

If You Don’t Know, Now You Know! (in which we get one factoid each)

Ilyse said that she loves how Yiddish-speaking Jews curse. It’s not all the f-bombs she likes to drop, it’s literal, actual-factual, “may you grow like an onion!” cursing.

Megan taught us about the very first constitutional protection for religious difference in the US, which followed a conversation between Moses Seixas, an 18th century Rhode Island Jew and George Washington. Seixas asked our first president to hold to the promise of America – a country that [should, anyway] “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” This correspondence helped shape Article 6 Paragraph 3 of the Constitution, meaning it predates the First Amendment!

Homework! (because there’s always more to learn)

Megan, first and foremost, wants to thank our guest Dr. Rabin again, and also tell y’all to read her work: 

  • Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America (link here)

  • "Mohalim, not Missionaries: Outsider and Insider Bodies in Southern Religious History" (link here)

  • “Space and Place,” A Universe of Terms, The Imminent Frame (link here)

  • A primary source from Congregation Tree of Life in the 1860s appears with my introduction as “In the Strictest Jewish Orthodox Stile”: A Contract Between Isaac Wolf and Congregation Etz Hayim (Pittsburgh, PA),"  in New Perspectives in American Jewish History: A Documentary Tribute to Jonathan D. Sarna (link here)

  • “Simon Gerstmann’s War: Religion, Loyalty, and Memory in the Post-Civil War Claims Courts,” with Adam H. Domby, Journal of Southern History Vol. 87, No. 4 (November 2021), 565-602. (link here)

  • “Jews and Sexuality in the Americas, 1519-1880,” with Laura A. Leibman, Religion Compass (June 2021) (link here).

Beyond Dr. Rabin, Megan assigns:

Megan also rec’d This is Where I Leave You

Ilyse also had homework!

Nerds of the Week! (because we love you for loving us)

Thanks for listening, rating and reviewing. This week’s nerd royalty are David_lac, lalcsl & MeredithWarren!!

outside Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Jews in the mountains?