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For my new BA course on music and contemporary history I use Spotify for (collaborative) playlists. We started with an introduction on musicology, (global) music history and how historians have engaged and engage with music, followed by two contextual classes on functions, technologies and categorisations of music. In the remaining classes we will talk about intersections with politics, nationalism and nation building, class, youth culture, (post-)colonialism, migration, religion and gender.

I am very very happy to return to music & history since my MA thesis on Jewish instrumental music in the 1990s (‘klezmer’ nowadays) and I am educating myself as much as the students.

In addition to reading and listening, part of the (group) work for students will be to create and curate their own playlists about the main themes (and yes, I am aware of much of the valid criticism of Spotify from an artist point of view, but as a teaching tool it adds a dimension that would be difficult to add otherwise).

Here is the list of playlists created so far (updated weekly):

Music & History 1 - Introduction:

My playlist for the introductory class is intended to illustrate some of the big themes we will discuss in the course of the seminar. They relate to both the contextual topics (functions, technologies, categorisations) and the themes outlined above.

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The international virtual conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age took place between 11-14 January 2021 and brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies.

The conference is part of a bigger project which includes an online portal, currently under development at the C²DH, which will offer a variety of different types of information on the intersection of Jewish Studies & Digital Humanities, including a news and events section, a registry of projects, blogs & forums, as well as a Zotero bibliography.

You can now visit the online archive of the conference here, including all abstracts and recordings, with lots of great talks and contributions to enjoy!

I wrote a review of Mapping Modern Jewish Cultures, a digital project on Jewish café culture, directed by Shachar Pinsker. The review was published in a special issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities devoted to Jewish Studies.

This article discusses the transnational heroic cult that developed in Yiddish communist circles around the figure of Naftali Botwin, a young Polish-Jewish communist who was executed by the Polish authorities in the city of Lwów following a trial in which he was accused of assassinating a police infiltrator in the ranks of the Polish Communist Party (KPP). The analysis brings out how Botwin’s legacy has been appropriated in multiple, and sometimes contradictory ways in the decades following his death, especially within the context of the creation of the Botwin Company in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. In so doing it will highlight the transnational nature of this cult as his memory lived on through the poems, plays and publications that circulated through the worldwide networks and communicative spaces of Jewish (leftist) émigrés.

The article can be found here and was published in the book: Le Culte des héros en Europe centrale 1880-1945 (Paris: Eur'Orbem Éditions, 2019).

In October 2019 I had an interview with Elena Hoffenberg for In Geveb, the online journal for Yiddish Studies.

Below is the brief introduction, you can read the whole interview here.

"It seemed fitting to break away from a conference bringing together American and European scholars and researchers working on digital humanities for an old-fashioned face-to-face conversation about Yiddish. During a conference on Digital Hermeneutics at the German Heritage Institute in Washington, DC, I sat down to talk with Gerben Zaagsma, who is an assistant professor at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg. In addition to being the author of the book Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (2017), Zaagsma is the curator of the invaluable online collection of links to all things Yiddish, yiddish-sources.com.

*** This is the written version of opening remarks I gave at From Tablet to Tablet, a workshop on Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities supported by the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe in co-operation with the Institute for the History of the German Jews that took place in Hamburg between 4-6 September 2017. Several introductiory blog posts and discussions with participants where posted on the Yerusha blog. 

My warmfelt thanks to Sinem Adar for comments on an earlier version. I have drawn in some parts upon an earlier article On Digital History published in 2013 as part of a thematic issue of the BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review on digital history.

These remarks are intended as a discussion piece so feedback and comments are most welcome!

My new book Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War is out now with Bloomsbury Academic.

The book's introduction can be downloaded for free here, and a preview is available here. More information can be found here and on the Bloomsbury Academic website.

The introduction to my forthcoming book, Jewish volunteers , the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War can now be downloaded through the link below.

The book will be published on 6 April. More information can be found here and on the Bloomsbury Academic website. 

Edit 14 March: Bloomsbury has provided a temporary 35% discount when ordering through their website, using the code JVIBSCW35.

Two months ago an important conference took place at the European University Institute in Florence on Public History and the Media. Exploring a variety of forms of public history, the second day was devoted to the topic of ‘digital public history’. While the links between the two fields are fairly obvious they are of course not the same. As one participant put it: “Digital History is not the same as Public History *but* Public History needs Digital History”. 

Various projects that were presented or referenced during this day explored ways in which the public can be engaged in, contribute to, and co-author history. Thus the Philadelphia Public History Truck, “a mobile museum project which partners with Philly neighborhood grassroots organizations to explore local history”, enables new voices and audiences to be heard and engage in (local) history. The Europeana 1914-1918 provides an excellent example of enaging the public to create a new user-generated online archive/museum. Digtal history functions in an enabling way here: new voices/audiences and user-generated materials empower ‘the public’ in various ways. But clearly these are also new forms of creating history. 

The slides for an introductory lecture on Search and Data Mining that I gave at the University of Luxembourg on 11 December 2014 are now online.