New Scholarship in Jewish History in Oregon and the American West

February 15, 2023 - February 15, 2023
Location: Zoom

A Six-Part Online Series with Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and Oregon Historical Society

Join us in early 2023 for a new and stimulating six-part series co-sponsored by OJMCHE and the Oregon Historical Society and focused on new interpretations of Jewish history in Oregon and the American West.

Series: $25 for OJMCHE and OHS members; $50 for non-members
Individual Programs: $5 for OJMCHE and OHS members; $10 for non-members
Purchase your ticket(s) at the bottom of the page.

Links to the zoom webinars will be sent out by email two days before each program. If you have any questions regarding this series, such as problems purchasing a ticket or not receiving the link, please get in touch with Amber Kurson at akurson@ojmche.org.

At the end of the series, anyone who has purchased a ticket will be able to access the recordings related to their tickets. 


January 11, Noon: Ellen Eisenberg, Rethinking Oregon Jewish Pioneers

Western historians have long framed the high level of acceptance and inclusion experienced by early Jewish settlers in the region in celebratory terms. Yet over the last several years, this story has begun to shift, as tales of heroic pioneers have been called into question by narratives of settler colonialism, land theft and genocide. In this presentation, Eisenberg will explore the impact of these shifting historical narratives from the point of view of a western Jewish historian, sharing how she rethought, revised and reframed her own work on Oregon Jewish pioneers in response to recent racial reckonings in western history and society.


January 18, Noon: Seth Cotlar, Rightlandia: Walter Huss and the Long History of the Far Right in Oregon, 1955-2005

Though he is little known and remembered today, Walter Huss (1918-2006) was one of Oregon’s leading right wing activists from the late 1950s up into the early 2000s. He had ties to dozens of neo-Nazi and right wing domestic terrorist groups in Oregon and around the nation. Cotlar will puzzle through a number of questions, drawing upon materials he has discovered in Huss’s papers: how did such a person manage to win an election to serve as the chair of the Oregon Republican Party in the summer of 1978? Why have so few Oregonians ever heard of him? To what extent does Huss’s decades-long, grassroots populist effort to push the Oregon Republican Party to the right help us understand the historical trajectory of the OR GOP? How does Huss’s story help us understand the ascendency of “grassroots right wing populism” inside the national GOP from the 1960s up to our present moment?


January 25, Noon: Steve Forrester, Richard Neuberger and the Decade that Changed Oregon: Researching the Life of a Consequential but Forgotten Public Man

Steve has spent 40 years researching Richard Neuberger and will discuss how Neuberger’s youthful experience as an outsider at the University of Oregon prepared him for the watershed 1954 race for the United States Senate.

Richard Neuberger was the second Jew elected to the United States Senate, following enactment of the 17th Amendment, calling for direct election of U.S. Senators. In that 1954 election, he became the first Democrat elected to the US Senate from Oregon in 40 years.

At the age of 20 in 1933, Neuberger traveled to Germany. His subsequent article titled “The New Germany” exposed the violence of the Nazi Brownshirts. Published in The Nation, it was called “an epoch-making article.”


February 1, Noon: Steve Wasserstrom, Oregon Jews at a Crossroad

Freshly retired after teaching Jewish studies for 35 years at Reed College, Wasserstrom reflects on the turbulent history of Jewish Portland since the 1980s. In the face of rising antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, oligarchic inroads into cultural, political and media power centers, we seem to be approaching a crossroads. Wasserstrom will address the recent past of our community, where it now seems to be headed, and some difficult choices that we must make.


February 8, Noon: Shane Burley, Jewish Antifascism

Looking at the Jewish radical tradition, Burley discusses how the Jewish religious, cultural, and historical experience can inform an antifascist intervention into the issues of oppression that threaten Jews and other marginalized people. Building on a critique of many of the organizations that make up our civic life, he charts an alternative pathway that seeks a different future for the Jewish people based on the lessons of Sinai.


February 15, Noon: Beyond Oregon: New Scholarship on Jewish Identities in the West

While the story of Jews “becoming white” became a major trope in American Jewish history over the last several decades, Jewish ethnic identity in the West has been far more complicated, due, in part, to the diversity of the region. How are scholars using a relational lens that centers connections with diverse racial/ethnic others to explore a range of western Jewish identities?  In this session, four contributors to the new anthology, Jewish Identities in the American West: Relational Perspectives, will share work that spans geographically from the Mexican border to Seattle and chronologically from the period of settlement to the late 20th century. Moderated by Ellen Eisenberg and featuring Max Modiano Daniel, Maxwell E Greenberg, Caroline Luce and Devin E. Naar.


Participants:

Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017), and the editor of the new book ¡No pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis. His work appears in places such as NBC News, The Daily Beast, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, The Baffler, and the Oregon Historical Quarterly.

Seth Cotlar is a Professor of History at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He’s currently working on an article entitled “Rightlandia: Walter Huss and the Long History of the Far Right in Oregon, 1955-2005.” Huss was an anti-communist crusader with ties to white nationalists and neo-Nazis who, in 1978, was elected chair of the Oregon Republican Party. Cotlar teaches courses on the history of the far right and the history of American Conservatism. His first book was Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2011), which won the James Broussard Prize for Best First Book from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He also co-edited Historian in Chief: How Presidents Interpret the Past to Shape the Future (University of Virginia Press, 2019) with Richard Ellis.

Max Modiano Daniel currently teaches Jewish Studies at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, CA. He received his PhD in History at UCLA where he completed his dissertation on the history of Sephardi Jews’ adaptive racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in twentieth century Los Angeles. He was recently awarded the inaugural Howard I. Friedman Memorial Essay Prize from the Skirball Cultural Institute in Los Angeles.  Max also co-hosts and produces a podcast about Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language and culture called El Ponte (The Bridge). He has published in Jewish Currents, Protocols, Judaica Librarianship, and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Ellen Eisenberg holds the Dwight and Margaret Lear Professorship in American History at Willamette University and is the editor of the recently published Jewish Identities in the American West: Relational Perspectives. Her prior work includes five monographs and a number of articles focusing on the history of Jews in the American West. The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII was a 2008 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her two volumes on the history of Jews in Oregon, Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849-1950 and The Jewish Oregon Story, 1950-2015, were published in 2015 and 2016.

Steve Forrester returned to his research on Richard Neuberger he had begun in 1978 following retirement from daily journalism.  He initially delivered a chapter on Neuberger’s life in “Eminent Oregonians,” published October 2021. Now he is writing a full biography of Neuberger, planned for a Fall 2024 release.

 

Maxwell E Greenberg is the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow of Jewish Studies at Washington University, St. Louis. He received his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from UCLA. His dissertation, The New Jewish Pioneer: Capital, Land, and Continuity on the US-Mexico Border, explores a modern, regional history between Jews and settler-colonial economies. He has developed curriculum and community programming for Jewish museums in the Southwest, and his scholarship has been published in Jewish Currents and Protocols.

Caroline Luce is a Research Fellow with the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA with a focus on immigration, labor and working-class culture in the American West and has published articles in American Jewish History, Shofar: A Journal of Jewish Studies, and In Geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies, as well as curating a dozen digital exhibits as Chief Curator of the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies’ Mapping Jewish Los Angeles Project. She is working on a book manuscript entitled, Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Jewish Radicalism, Labor and Culture in Los Angeles.

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies, Associate Professor of History, and faculty at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. The book won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Research Based on Archival Material and was named a finalist in Sephardic Culture. It also won the 2017 Edmund Keeley Prize for best book in Modern Greek Studies awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association. It was translated into Greek by Alexandria Press in Athens in 2018.

Steven M. Wasserstrom is completing a sabbatical year prior to retirement as the Moe and Izetta Tonkon Professor of Judaic Studies and the Humanities at Reed College, where he taught since 1987. He served as the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies at the College of William and Mary, and as an Invited Scholar at the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin. He has written numerous works including Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early IslamReligion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos; and “The Fullness of Time”: Poems by Gershom Scholem.


Information regarding the lectures, such as the zoom link, will be sent out to ticket holders closer to the date of each individual lecture.

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