Do you know the song “Mayim Mayim?” Maybe you learned it at Hebrew School, or sleepaway camp. It’s a celebratory Israeli folk classic based on text from the book of Isaiah about, as the title suggests, water. The song’s composer is Emanuel Amiran-Pougatchov, who would go on to be the country’s Minister of Music Education, and in 1937 choreographer Else I. Dublin created the dance still used today.

But other than your summer camp or Israel, the places you’re most likely to hear this song are Japan or Taiwan.

Seriously, everyone in Japan knows “Mayim Mayim.”

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

The post How An Israeli Folk Song Became a Hit on Japanese Video Game Soundtracks appeared first on Jewcy.

Depending on how you count, there have been about twenty serious assassination attempts on presidents of the United States in the country’s history. It’s nothing to be proud of, but did you know that one of the attempted assassins was Jewish?

Samuel Joseph Byck was born in South Philadelphia in 1930 to a poor Jewish family (did your Bubbe know him, perhaps?). On February 22, 1974, he set into motion a plot to kill Richard Nixon. It didn’t go well for him.

Prior to his violent scheme, Byck was an all-around schlemiel who more-or-less failed at everything he tried. He was a high school dropout who had difficulty holding down a job or starting new businesses. His wife divorced him, and took his four children (where are they today?). He fell into despair and became disillusioned with the United States, particularly President Nixon’s oppression of poor Americans.

Before his attempt, he began creating recordings of himself ranting, and sent them out  usually to famous figures he admired, including Leonard Bernstein and Jonas Salk (I’m not going to link to any of them here, but you can find some of these on the Internet).

Byck’s plan was this: Hijack a plane, kill the pilot, and fly it into the White House, killing President Nixon.

While Byck’s attempt was a decided flop, unfortunately, he did kill two people. The first victim was a security guard who confronted him. Next, Byck boarded a plane and threatened the pilot and co-pilot. When they explained that the plane couldn’t yet fly even if they wanted it to, he shot them both. Ultimately, the pilot survived; the co-pilot did not. As police attempted to apprehend Byck, he shot and killed himself. He was 44.

The assassination attempt didn’t even affect Nixon’s schedule that day.

Samuel Byck: Not a Jew to be proud of, but a Jew You Should Know. His legacy includes being played by Sean Penn in a biopic, and existing as a character in the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins. On that front, you could do worse. So let’s conclude with Byck on Broadway, as played by Mario Cantone:

Image via Pinterest.

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With all the think-pieces about the idea of America having its first Jewish president, everyone forgets that the United States had already had a Jewish supreme leader: Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

Joshua A. Norton is one of the coolest figures from American History. Basically, he declared himself emperor of the country, and the city of San Francisco responded, “Sure, why not?”

Emperor Norton (to refer to him by his proper title) was an immigrant; he was born in England to a Jewish family, and grew up in South Africa. He came to the United States at about age 30, in 1849, with his parents’ large inheritance, and dreams of growing his fortune. He lost the money on a bad investment and wound up destitute.

So what’s a broke, Jewish immigrant to the United States to do? Languish a few years, and then, in 1859, issue a proclamation:

At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

— NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.

A major newspaper dutifully printed the words of their new, wise ruler, and his subjects quickly fell in line. For example, the emperor issued his own money, which was honored by many merchants and residents.

Locals yielded to him for his many regular duties, including inspecting buildings, promenading (often on horseback provided by an admirer), and making sure his uniform was impeccable; his subjects gave donations to help him maintain his signature look of a military uniform with epaulets, a beaver hat, a cane, and a sword. He was also frequently honored by gifts from those he ruled, such as free meals at restaurants, and his own box at the opera.

Emperor Norton also issued many proclamations during his two-decade reign, including ones that abolished Congress, both the Democrat and Republican parties, and referring to his home city as “Frisco.”

Alas, traitorous powers undermined many of these decrees, and HaShem knows that had they been fully obeyed and carried out we could avoid a lot of anguish in our political system today.

Other decrees were fulfilled, some after his death, including one that a league be formed between the countries of the world (in fact, the United Nations met for the first time in San Francisco), and that a suspension bridge be built over the San Francisco bay to Oakland (the Emperor regularly visited Oakland by ferry, though he never had to pay fare.

Even though history has generally treated Emperor Norton as an assimilated Jew, he was actually an active member of the Jewish community, and would attend Shabbat services every week at Congregation Emanu-El.

Plus, comic-book-writing-superstar Neil Gaiman once featured Emperor Norton in an issue of Sandman, where he posited that the monarch was a “Lamed Vavnik,” one of the 36 hidden righteous who keep the world from coming to an end.

When Emperor Norton died, thousands attended his funeral (not a Jewish one), and it had all the fanfare befitting a man of his station.

So huzzah to you, Joshua Norton.  Long did you reign, and as a San Francisco newspaper wrote about you:

“The Emperor Norton has never shed blood. He has robbed no one, and despoiled no country. And that, gentlemen, is a hell of a lot more than can be said for anyone else in the king line.”

Image credit: Wikimedia

See also: Your Guide to ‘Jewish Slang’ in Victorian England

The post Jews You Should Know: Emperor Norton appeared first on Jewcy.

Hannah Szenes has become a near-legendary figure in Jewish heroism: After escaping Nazi-Europe in 1939 and making it to Palestine, she decided to volunteer as a paratrooper and return to her native Hungary to rescue Jews. She was then arrested, tortured, and ultimately executed for treason at age 23.

But what makes her legacy so enduring is her writing; she was a poet from a young age, and her most famous work, “Towards Caesarea” (often called “Eli, Eli,”) was put to music, and can be found in summer camp songbooks,  Regina Spektor concerts, and playing over the ending of some versions of Schindler’s List.

But here’s the thing: Szenes had other work. She didn’t have the time to be prolific, but during her short life, she wrote in multiple languages: poems, diaries, and at least two plays.

Here’s the translation of a poem she wrote when she was only thirteen, which reads sort of like the emo poetry you wrote when you were her age, only better:

“Life is a brief and hurtling day, pain and striving fill every page.
Just time enough to glance around,
Register a face or sound
and—life’s been around.”

In retrospect, sure, the poem seems prophetic, but the darker work was yet to come. Though it’s really a shame that Szenes is known as a tragic figure, when some of her writing was joyous, and even hilarious. Take this adolescent diary entry:

“Do boys interest me? Well, yes, they interest me more than before, but only in general because I didn’t see a single boy I really liked the entire summer. True, I didn’t meet very many. This is my idea of the ideal boy:

“He should be attractive and well dressed, but not a fop; he should be a good sportsman, but interested in other things besides sports; he should be cultured and intelligent, but good-humored and not arrogant; and he should not chase after girls. And so far I have not met a single boy like this.”

She didn’t make it far past being a teenager, but maybe her stint on a kibbutz found someone at least approaching that standard.

Szenes continued to write in captivity, and after she died, a poem, likely from early on in her imprisonment, was found written on the wall of her cell. It’s sad, and resigned, but not regretful.

For this one Jewish girl, from worrying about boys, to facing her own mortality head-on, Szenes fit a lot into a short life.

The poem reads:

“One – two – three… eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three… maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.”

Image credit: Wikimedia

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It’s officially the Omer, the gap between Passover and Shavuot, in which Jews are commanded each night to count one more day. Excited? No? Well Jewcy has just the motivation: a Pop Culture Omer.

You see, there’s a pretty strict rule against mentioning the number of a certain day early or, you know, you’ve counted it. So we have combed through Jewish history and pop culture to find stand-ins for each of the 49 nights, and we’ve already started tweeting them (#PopCultureOmer). Think of it as an update of the above image, an Omer calendar from 1850.

Anyway, here is the full list in all its glory, questions and answers laid bare. Study up, and follow @JewcyMag for your daily cryptic reminder of what you’ll be counting any given night.

1.  How many Jewish women have held the title of Miss America?
2.  Count the bestie broads on Broad City.
3. How many Oscars does Steven Spielberg have?
4. Brian Epstein was the manager for the most famous band in history, known sometimes as the Fab _.
5. How many Marx brothers were there (don’t forget Gummo!)?
6. How many productions of Fiddler on the Roof have played on Broadway?
7. This year of the Tony Awards was great for Jews, with Arthur Miller winning best play for The Crucible and lots of Jews winning for musical Wonderful Town.
8. How many Jews have served as U.S. Supreme Court Justices (sans Merrick Garland)?
9. How many seasons of Seinfeld were there?
10. For this answer, fill in the blank for the title of the Paddy Chayefsky play: The ____ Man.
11. How many Olympic medals (of any rank) did Mark Spitz acquire in his career?
12. The Producers holds the record for the Broadway musical with the most Tony Awards. How many?
13. What’s the name of a Jason Robert Brown musical involving a kid prepping for his Bar Mitzvah?
14. How many studio albums does Bette Midler have to date?
15. At this age Drake’s career began, with his acting role on Degrassi: The Next Generation.
16. This was Natalie Portman’s age when she played Anne Frank on Broadway.
17. Joseph Gordon-Levitt celebrates his birthday this day in February.
18. This was Aly Raisman’s age when she won an Olympic gold medal.
19. At what age did Barbra Streisand make her Broadway debut (in I Can Get it for You Wholesale)?
20. How many seasons of Judge Judy have there been (so far)?
21. The age at which an American Jew can have a legal L’Chaim!
22. How many feature-length films did one or both Coen brothers write and/or direct?
23. How many years has the Notorious RBG served on SCOTUS?
24. Barbra Streisand celebrates her birthday this day in April.
25. Rashida Jones celebrates her birthday this day in February.
26. Mel Brooks (may he live until 120) was born in 19__.
27. How many novels or novellas has Philip Roth written?
28. How many films has Judd Apatow produced to date?
29. What is Sheldon Adelson’s net worth, rounded to the nearest billion?
30. At what age did Marilyn Monroe convert to Judaism?
31. What is Scarlett Johansson’s current age?
32. What was Sandy Koufax’s baseball jersey number?
33. How many countries voted for the 1947 U.N. partition plan?
34. How many studio albums does Barbra Streisand have to date?
35. How many years ago did Simon and Garfunkel record their famous Central Park concert?
36. Keeping Up with the Steins had this (unfairly low) percentage on RottenTomatoes.
37. What was James Franco’s age at his Bar Mitzvah?
38. What is the number of the next World Zionist Congress, scheduled for 2020?
39. What was the number of weeks The Chosen was on the New York Times bestseller list?
40. What was Yentl‘s Box Office gross, rounded to the nearest million?
41. How many years ago did Jewish-directed films Funny Lady, Young Frankenstein, and Jaws all premiere?
42. In the Hebrew numerical code of gematria, what is the value of Google? Hint: It’s the answer to the Life, the Universe, and Everything.
43. How many years ago did the Jewish film The Way We Were premiere?
44. How many years ago did Bette Midler release her debut album, The Divine Miss M?
45. What is Idina Menzel’s current age?
46. What is Jack Black’s current age?
47. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches won Best Play in this Tony Year.
48. What is Judd Apatow’s current age?
49. Not to end on a low note, but how many years ago did Paul Muni die?Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The post The Pop Culture Omer appeared first on Jewcy.

You’re in luck! An authentic 1909 slang dictionary is available for free online, and its many delights include words and phrases about and of the Jewish community of London’s East End. These Jews, many of them immigrants from other European countries and their descendants, were largely working class, often operating in trade when intersecting with mainstream society, but also having a world unto themselves. With this combination of insularity and mingling with a racist culture in cursory ways, what could possibly go wrong?

Routledge books published Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English Slang and Phrase in 1909 (a few years after the era formally ended). James Redding Ware, the pseudonym of English writer Andrew Forrester, is the author. You can read the whole book online, and it’s quite a work. The dictionary is full of gems you should absolutely incorporate into your vocabulary ASAP: A “mutton shunter” is a police officer, and “batty-fang” is “to thrash thoroughly.” You can use enough of these words to make yourself completely incomprehensible, if you like. Instead of going for a walk to look at the sky, “Do a stamp” to “cast an optic” at the “blue blanket.”

The introduction to the book mentions that it contains several entries for “Anglo-Yiddish,” part of a specifically East London vernacular rich in language “outgrown from the Hebrew stem.” Jews were a growing minority, so they’re well-represented in this work.

In contemporary America, especially cities like New York, words like “schlep” and “chutzpah” have made it to the mainstream, so how did Jews factor into the common language in the epicenter of one of the world’s most powerful empires? Let’s go through a Magical Mystery Tour.

To get it over with, the first category isn’t words borrowed from Jews so much as… slurs. But get excited— you’ve never seen anti-Semitic slurs as nuanced and colorful as this! There are variations for any occasion:

I do wonder why did army veterans in particular tended to use that slur, but other slurs are so bizarre they’re almost delightful:

Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same! I too get in full feather when it’s Pentecost Shobboth! But what about my male counterparts? This only applies to Jewesses, like me!

As someone who bristles at the term “J.A.P,” it’s nice to know that Jewish women have always been shamed for attempting to make themselves look nice as though it were a sign of unearned entitlement.

Ah, thank you. I have no idea what the difference is between a “young Joseph” and “young old David.”

Next, we have words as advertised, lifted out of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Jewish culture. It seems something might have been lost in translation, and at times, transliteration:

…What?

Er… points for sort of including Jews of Color, I suppose. And yes, it’s true. Most Jews can proficiently sing before we can hold our heads up on our own.

The thought of English Christians calling their church “shool” is somehow hilarious. As for “shofel,” thanks for tying it into hooked noses at the last second there. That was almost a missed opportunity!

This dictionary seems to have used Israel Zangwill’s novel Children of the Ghetto as the ultimate source for Judaism. Zangwill was an authentic source, but it’s also clear that Ware didn’t bother to find a real Jewish person with whom to talk, as becomes increasingly clear:

Oh, honey. You tried.

First of all, the words for 1 and 6 in Hebrew, transliterated respectively, are Echad and Shesh.

Next, the explanation for how Hebrew works (backwards with no vowels) doesn’t make sense in the Latin alphabet. Let’s have a secret message writing the same way:

THSLLB S SHT.

So close again! But did you know Jews immigrated to the U.K. from more than two European countries?

Finally, there is actually some slang in the book that seems to be used within the Jewish community (though I somehow doubt it’s comprehensive, or even fully accurate):

Fun fact- this was the motto of Moses Montefiore. Really.

File that one under “Ideas for Names for Jewish Punk Bands.”

OK, Jews do like olives. You get that one.

OK, I admit that I was so excited to learn about a Jewish pastry I had never heard of that I tracked down the recipe and made it. But that is a story for another day.

Reading through these can be a bit exhausting if you don’t have a sense of humor. Ultimately, Ware was adorably misguided. He was trying to depict authentic London street language and culture, but was still looking through the lens of good-old-fashioned Victorian racism and imperialism. These are the Jews that Dickens and du Maurier caricatured, where gross stereotype is taken as sociological study.

At least it’s also a peek into a great chapter in Jewish history, and some great ideas for the names of the lineup at a neo-klezmer festival.

To part, here are a few other selections from the dictionary, ranging from the innocuous to the nigh incomprehensible:

Or, you can spell it with a “K”:

It’s been real.  BEXANDEB OUT!

The post Your Guide to ‘Jewish Slang’ in Victorian England appeared first on Jewcy.

Historian Sara Lipton has penned a fascinating article for the New York Review of Books about the origins of the caricature of the hook-nosed Jew. In ‘The Invention of the Jewish Nose,‘ Lipton, author of Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Iconography, explains that the image of the Jew with the massive schnoz—the one we know so well from Nazi propaganda, to name just one example—is “far from ‘eternal'” and in fact didn’t exist before 1000 AD. (Actually, she points out, there were no “distinguishable Jews of any kind in Western imagery, let alone the stereotypical swarthy, hook-nosed Jew” until about a thousand years ago.)

“When Christian artists did begin to single out Jews,” Lipton writes, “it was not through their bodies, features, or even ritual implements, but with hats. Around the year 1100… Hebrew prophets wearing distinctive-looking pointed caps began appearing in the pages of richly illuminated Bibles and on the carved facades of the Romanesque churches that were then rising across western Christendom.” In a farcical turn of events in 1267, two church councils ordered Jews to wear pointy hats in the style of their forebears, not understanding that the imagery was an invention of Christian art.

Anyway, noses! How did the huge proboscis come to represent the Jew, and later become associated with the anti-Semitic stereotype of the evil, conspiratorial Israelite? In the second half the twelfth century, Christian artists began to portray the suffering and death of Jesus Christ in art. This was quite controversial at the time, and a lot of people were uncomfortable seeing such explicit representations of Christ’s suffering. “Proponents of the new devotions criticized such resistance,” explains Lipton. “Failure to be properly moved by portrayals of Christ’s affliction was identified with ‘Jewish’ hard-hearted ways of looking.” So how did the artists portray non-believers, i.e. Jews? With their heads turned away from Christ’s suffering. And how would an artist emphasize the direction of said non-believer’s gaze? By giving them a large, distinctive nose, which would clearly show which way they were looking—away from Christ.

And so the caricature of the big-nosed Jew was born, though that nose wasn’t necessarily hook-shaped. (It may have been pointy or snouty, for example.) It took a few decades for the grotesque, hook-nosed Jewish stereotype to become an entrenched thing, and many more for it to take on the anti-Semitic connotations of greed, deception, and duplicitousness exemplified in Nazi propaganda. But ultimately, the “Jewish nose” has a lot more to do with Christian iconography and faith than it does with actual Jewish noses.

Read Lipton’s fascinating—and, yes, kind of depressing—article here.

(Image: Anti-semitic pamphlet from France, 1930s.)

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You might have heard of the Sonderkommando Revolt that took place in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944. You might know that on this day, a group of Sonderkommando—Jewish prisoners who were forced to haul bodies out of gas chambers and dispose of them in crematoriums—blew up Crematorium IV and cut through the barbed wire fence surrounding the camp, allowing two hundred prisoners to escape, albeit only temporarily. But you are probably not familiar with the four women who made the revolt possible by smuggling gunpowder from an Auschwitz munitions factory, where they worked as slave laborers.

“October 7, 1944,” a small exhibit at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, pays tribute to Roza Robota, Estera Wajcblum, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Ala Gertner—the female leaders of the Auschwitz resistance, who were ultimately tortured and hanged for their participation in the revolt. Their names, faded from the annals of history, are painted in stark white against one of the gallery’s dark walls. The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Four Women,” a film of interpretive dance by the celebrated choreographer Jonah Bokaer.

Bokaer shot the film in a sparse, grey warehouse, where four dancers took on the personas of Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner. Because the women were forced into manual labor, and because they hid illicit gunpowder under their nails, much of the performance is preoccupied with the dancers’ hands. They scrape at the ground, paw frantically at their fingertips, and grasp at each other in a desperate, sometimes violent way that evokes the terrifying circumstances of their relationship. For most of the performance, the dancers’ features are obscured by their long hair, until, in a jarring shift of focus, the film cuts between lingering close-ups of their faces. It is a powerful moment of revelation in a performance that strives to shine the spotlight on four courageous women whose stories are often excluded from histories of the Holocaust.

Another reel is projected on the opposite wall, a steady shot of the ruins of Crematorium IV, which Bokaer filmed during a five-day period of immersion at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gallery also displays a series of documents that relate to the revolt with varying degrees of directness; among them are an Auschwitz logbook that contains the name of a man who is believed to be Szafirsztajn’s father, an eyewitness account of the work of the Sonderkommando, and another eyewitness account that describes dead bodies being carried out of a crematorium as a band of prisoner-musicians played in the background.

Though the four women at the center of the exhibit were not part of Auschwitz’s prisoner band, music is central to the installation. Bach’s Violin Partita in D Minor, which Auschwitz’s band was regularly forced to perform, plays in an incessant loop. Behind each glass case containing primary source documents hangs an illuminated sheet of paper, onto which Bokaer painted segments of the Partita’s score.

I know the significance of many of these details because I was given a tour of the exhibit by the museum’s director. But for those who peruse “October 7, 1944” unattended, the gallery offers little curatorial direction. There is no text explaining that the plinths in front of each primary source document are bricks from the ruins of Crematorium IV; no indication that the muddy ruins depicted in the exhibit’s second film are the exploded remnants of that very same crematorium; no hint that Bokaer chose Bach’s Partita as a soundtrack for his installation because it was one of the few melancholy scores to be played in Auschwitz (the others were jaunty polkas, meant to lull Jewish prisoners into a false sense of calm before they were gassed to death).

The decision to keep the exhibit free of textual explanations was deliberate, and there is certainly something to be said for unburdening art installations of belabored discussions about meaning and intention. But the relevance of so many poignant, thoughtful touches is lost as a result of the exhibit’s minimalism. Significantly, I left the gallery knowing very little about Robota, Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner, aside from their names. Though the brochure for “October 7, 1944” claims that the installation strives to “[give] four heroines their place in Holocaust history,” the gallery offers no biographical information about the women who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the resistance. They remain colorless figures, shrouded in the mystery of their hidden pasts.

And so I thought I would divert the course of this review to put forth what little information is known about these four brave women, who were hanged in the last public execution to take place at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated.

Estera Wajcblum was born in Warsaw in 1924. Both of her parents were deaf-mutes, and they were murdered immediately upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz. After the revolt failed and Wajcblum was contained in a prison block, she smuggled a note to her little sister, who was also a prisoner in the camp. The note read: “Not for me the glad tidings of forthcoming salvation; everything is lost and so I want to live.”

Regina Szafirsztajn was born in Bedzin, Poland. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1943.

Ala Gertner, also from Bedzin, belonged to a wealthy family. She was well-educated, and fluent in German. In late 1940, Gertner was ordered to work at the office of a labor camp in Sosnowiec, Poland. There, she met a man named Bernhard Holtz, and the two were married in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1941. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Twenty-eight letters that Gertner wrote to her friend Sala Kirschner are on display in a permanent collection at the New York Public Library.

Roza Robota was a member of the Hashomer Hatzair socialist movement as a young woman living in Ciechanów, Poland. She liked to be called by her Hebrew name, Shoshanna. After being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, Robota worked in a clothing depot next to Crematorium III. She had connections to the underground resistance, and convinced Wajcblum, Szafirsztajn, and Gertner to join the movement and capitalize on their access to the camp’s munitions factory. Before the noose was tightened around her neck on the day of her execution, Robota called out to the prisoners assembled before the gallows: “Sisters, revenge!”

Four Women (Excerpt), 2014 from Jonah Bokaer on Vimeo.

“October 7, 1944” runs through December 30 at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

(Image credit: Janek Skarzynski/Getty Images)

The post Through Dance, New Exhibit Pays Tribute to Women of Auschwitz Resistance appeared first on Jewcy.

Like most other young academics, I’m always agonizing about tenure and job security. “Peace? Who wants peace?” I often jokingly respond when people ask me for my opinion about the Arab-Israeli conflict. “As a professor of Israel Studies, instability is good for my career!” Unfortunately, thanks to recent weeks of war and crisis, it seems like my employment prospects are bright. The line between the personal and professional is liminal in this so-called Holy Land.

I’m writing from Jerusalem, where I’ve left the library for the classroom of lived experience this summer. I arrived for a few months of research on my book only days into the national drama of the kidnapping of three teenagers in the West Bank (at a hitchhiking post I myself have stood at, no less), later found murdered by rogue terrorists from Hebron. Later that week, while running errands in the center of town, I was quite shaken when I unintentionally found myself in the midst of a mob protest by radical right-wing Israelis screaming “Kahane was right,” and “Arabs are sons of bitches,” as they ran past me toward a fast-food restaurant looking for a Palestinian employee to lynch.

A few days later, a splinter group seemingly inspired by these riots brutally tortured and immolated Muhammed al-Kheidr, an innocent teenager from East Jerusalem. As Israelis and Palestinians began to reckon with these dual tragedies, the Hamas rocket campaign and corresponding Israeli retaliatory bombings of Gaza started in earnest, with the conversation soon shifting from searching our souls to searching for the nearest bomb shelter. There has been no refuge for the tumult in our collective consciousness over the past month. (On the bright side, I did get to meet all my new neighbors without proper underwear, as the first rocket siren caught me in the shower with less than a minute to throw on a sundress and seek shelter.)

Last week, Israel initiated a ground invasion to uncertain ends. So much for that relaxing summer sabbatical on the beach and sipping cappuccinos in the Old City, I thought to myself. Here we go again.

Every day I turn on my laptop to more bad news. How have we not hit bottom, I wonder, how can it possibly be getting worse? I’ve probably read every major book written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the past few decades—I skimmed them all for my doctoral exams so you don’t have to!—and feel that scholarship has failed us completely. How can I feel so ill-equipped respond to the current crisis, when understanding the Israel-Palestinian conflict is my day job?

Perhaps because years of reading, researching, writing, and thinking about the conflict have deprived me of simple, easy dichotomies: good vs. evil, Israel vs. Palestine, winners vs. losers, peace vs. war, past vs. future. How I long to luxuriate in the realm of intellectual, emotional, and moral certitude! I sometimes wish for a world of black and white, when all I see is complexity in shades of grey.

Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I feel an obligation to explain, to dialogue, to argue, to share my expertise, for whatever it’s worth. With campuses empty on summer vacation, I’ve traded lecture halls for social media, which has become my classroom, my battlefield (since I am privileged not to have to experience the real one), and even my (Jewish) cross to bear. Whether it’s fighting open-heartedly with a Gazan friend on Facebook, trading quips on Twitter, or writing blog posts, I feel compelled to contribute my knowledge and continue the conversation.  I sometimes feel like I should receive danger pay in this business: moderating between right-wingers and left-wingers, challenging conventional dogma, trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to bring new voices and keep old faces involved in a discussion can be emotionally taxing and ego-bruising. But I see my job as much as a calling as a career, so tuning out isn’t really a choice.

Engaging in a “war” online, however,  prompts big questions. How can academics best contribute to public debate in times of crisis?  Switching my scholar’s tweed cap for my pundit hat blurs the boundary between the personal and the professional, the private and the political. Online discourse is a challenge to “that noble dream” of academic objectivity, but it’s also some of the most important work a historian can do these days. I do not hide my proud affiliation as a liberal Zionist, but my primary agenda is to bring my knowledge and historical perspective to contemporary issues, helping to put them in context.  Mostly, I try to mediate between multiple narratives. I doubt I’ll be winning a Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon. Truth be told, it can sometimes feel futile—when earnest efforts at engagement, analysis, and dialogue devolve into name-calling and uncritical ranting; when you just can’t get people to see eye-to-eye late at night on Facebook. It’s intellectually and emotionally exhausting work — I don’t blame many of my colleagues for giving up, taking a break, or avoiding this work entirely, since not every academic feels it is part of their job description.  Sometimes, I feel like tuning out and going back to writing that obscure book or journal article that only four people in the universe will read, including my Mom.

But in those few moments when people—especially those who are perhaps not involved or ideologically committed—plead with you to proceed, to continue the authentic multi-dimensional discussion, or even to begin to redefine what Israel and Zionism mean to our generation, how can I give up? Online engagement is one important component of that precious opportunity to be a Jewish and Zionist leader—it’s a mission I won’t pass up.

Mostly, being a historian in a time of crisis is a heart-breaking business, especially when one becomes a historical witness to the profound lack of empathy on both sides of the conflict. Dehumanization is our worst enemy. How we can ever have peace without acknowledging the “other” as a person; without acknowledging the basic truth that they are human beings with human rights? How can we co-exist without compassion in the present? Perhaps it would be useful to reinvent the role of historian as a kind of ‘empatharian,’ one who teaches others how to empathize with the lived past, so that we can be encouraged to contemplate our future together.

Unfortunately, professors don’t have all the answers about how to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the most important thing is to ask the right questions. Since I began teaching in England, I am often reminded of Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

If we can continue to remind ourselves that both Israelis and Palestinians are people deserving of human rights—and also capable of acts of vengeance—historical empathy may lead us one step closer to an enduring peace.

Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is the University Research Lecturer/Sidney Brichto fellow in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford (UK), where she’s working on a forthcoming book (from Harvard University Press) entitled “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement Since 1967.” Her twitter handle is @SaraHirschhorn1. 

Image: Sukharevskyy Dmytro (nevodka) / Shutterstock.com

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103 years ago today, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed 146 garment workers in New York City. The fire most likely started when an unextinguished match or cigarette butt set a bin of fabric cuttings alight. For the workers inside the building—mostly girls and young women; immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy—there was no escape: the doors and stairwells of the factory had been locked to prevent unscheduled breaks, trapping them inside. Many jumped to their deaths.

Two days after the tragedy, Forverts editor Abraham Cahan penned this moving cri de coeur:

The entire neighborhood is sitting shiva. Every heart is torn in mourning. The human heart is drowning in tears. What a catastrophe! What a dark misfortune!

Have we not written and initiated for weeks, months, years about the risky modern shop buildings with hundreds of young men and women workers who are always in danger for their lives in those buildings? Have we not agitated about these horrible firetraps?

Significant positives did emerge from the tragedy, however, including sweeping labor reforms, the strengthening of the unions, and the enshrinement of workers’ rights in law. But today, in other parts of the world, the conditions that led to the Shirtwaist fire are still the norm—a seemingly necessary part of the developed world’s insatiable demand for cheap, disposable clothing. Writes Kate Stoeffel at The Cut:

Today, more than 97 percent of American garments are imported from countries where our century-old regulations are not adequately enforced, like Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest garment exporter.Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza garment factory was the site of the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry less than a year ago, when a factory built without a permit—but that passed Western audits—collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. (More than half of the victims were women.)

Since 2004, volunteers have been chalking the names of the Shirtwaist victims as an annual memorial on the sidewalks of New York, outside the buildings they once called home. The organizers of the event write: “the chalk will wash away but the following year we return, insisting on the memory of these lost young workers.”

You can find a detailed map of the victims’ names, educational materials, and more information about today’s events at the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

And to help to support workers’ rights today, check out this great list of resources courtesy of the good folks at Repair the World.

(Chalk image: courtesy of Tablet columnist Marjorie Ingall.)

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