Associate Professor of History Eric L. Goldstein and Deborah R. Weiner co-authored On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore. The work has been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldstein is a specialist in American Jewish history and culture, modern Jewish history, and American social and cultural history. Read more about the publication here.
Over the last two weeks eight undergraduate honors students presented proposals for their honors theses to faculty, staff, and fellow students in the History Department. Each student has a faculty advisor for the project, and all are enrolled in the Honors Seminar HIST 495A, led by Dr. Matthew J. Payne and Dr. Judith Miller. Above are pictures of the students in action, and below is the full list of student projects.
Congratulations to graduate student Kyungtaek Kwon for winning the best graduate paper award from the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies. Kwon’s paper is titled, “The Boundary of Komsomol’tsy between Heroes and Vydvizhentsy in the Soviet Far Eastern City Komsomol’sk-na-Amure in the 1930s.” Associate Professor of History Matthew J. Payne is Kwon’s advisor.
Ellie R. Schainker, Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of Modern European Jewish History, published Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 with Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2017 National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material (JDC-Herbert Katzki Award). Below, she offers a glimpse into the making of the monograph as a part of the History Department’s series on recent faculty publications.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
Confessions of the Shtetl was born during my course work in grad school from the footnotes of two articles I stumbled across. I was part of a second-wave of scholars trained in the post-1991 era when former Soviet archives were newly open to western researchers. I was interested in Russian Jewish history and these articles indicated that there were treasure troves of archival material—should researchers ever gain access–documenting conversions from Judaism in the imperial Russian borderlands, or the famed “shtetls” (Yiddish, small towns) of Eastern Europe that had been idealized by nostalgic modernists and post-Holocaust mourners as the last outpost of authentic Jewish culture and solidarity in the modern period. These footnotes suggested that there was a larger untold story of interfaith encounter and border-crossing in the demographic heartland of European Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hoped that these stories might help us reconceptualize the religious and ethnic diversity of the empire’s western borderlands, the fluidity and permeability of boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, and the relationship between ethno-religious groups and the state which tolerated and even sponsored religious diversity.
What was the research process like?
It was long and exciting. It took me to Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and New York City during my dissertation years and my early assistant professor years at Emory. Two aspects of the research stand out: 1) I thought I was fluent in Russian till I had to decipher hand-written nineteenth-century Cyrillic in the archives, and I briefly considered switching careers. 2) I came to appreciate the Russian archival system which has researchers sign a slip of paper in each archival folio listing every person who ever ordered and read that file. It looped me into a group of scholars whose footsteps I was following in and whose interests I shared. It became a kind of game for me in the archives to see if I could discover new files and be the first to sign my name, and it made me feel as part of a virtual research cohort during the sometimes long, lonely days in the archives.
Do you have a favorite chapter or section?
My favorite section is Part II, which I consider the heart of the book. This section features many microhistories of converts, their Christian neighbors and romantic partners, and their often irate family and community members. I love it because it brings to life the human drama of faith and apostasy, and gets at the pathos of historical phenomena that often get overlooked in social-scientific analyses of minority integration and assimilation.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
This project is a first step in studying toleration, imperialist critiques of native religion, and how these and other modern developments have allowed people to articulate and experience faith in new ways.
Congratulations to History Honors student Beatrix Conti, who was recently awarded a Halle Institute – Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Global Research Fellowship for conducting research during the Summer of 2018. Conti is an English and History double major, and her project is entitled The Sassoon Family: Jewish Engagement with British Imperialism and the Opium Trade. View the full list of fellows here.
Emory’s Tam Institute for Jewish Studies has awarded a research and travel grant to History Honors student Liza Gellerman. The grant will support Gellerman’s research during the Summer of 2018. Gellerman also won an Undergraduate Humanities Honors Fellowship for the fall of 2018 from the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies, for winning a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in constitutional studies. In 2016 Anderson published the New York Times bestseller White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury). Her next book, One Person, No Vote, is slated for publication this September. Read more about Dr. Anderson and the fellowship here.
Dr. Joseph Crespino, Jimmy Carter Professor of History, wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal entitled “Who is the Real Atticus Finch?” The piece explores competing interpretations of Harper Lee’s protagonist as a champion of justice or racist in the context of an adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. Crespino is the author of Atticus Finch: The Biography — Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon (Basic Books, 2018). Read the full piece (paywall protected) here.