The People’s Torah: Crowd-Sourcing Jewish Customs from An-ski to the Internet
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Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Nathaniel Deutsch | Delivered in English.
A century ago, Sh. An-ski, the revolutionary and playwright most famous for The Dybbuk, described the countless customs that guided Jewish daily life as a kind of “Oral Torah.” To document the People's Torah, An-ski created a massive ethnographic questionnaire in Yiddish for use in the Russian Pale of Settlement and especially among its Hasidic residents. Now, a team of researchers led by Nathaniel Deutsch is launching The Digital Minhag Project, an interactive website built around a Yiddish-English version of An-ski’s ethnographic questionnaire that seeks to crowd-source contemporary Jewish customs or minhagim, beginning with those still practiced by Hasidic communities. What has changed since An-ski created his questionnaire? What has remained the same?
About the Speaker
Nathaniel Deutsch combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to explore phenomena from antiquity to the modern period. He is a professor of history and holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as the Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute for more than a decade and the Chair of the University of California Consortium of Humanities Centers. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and an Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians. Deutsch is currently creating “The Digital Minhag Project: A Crowd-Sourced Archive of Jewish Customs.”