Henry Abramson: There’s the metaphor of the coiled spring, where you have the Jews who are artificially restrained by a series of antisemitic discriminatory legislation, social discrimination, and things like that. And as soon as the society allows the Jews to express themselves more fully, then they bound out of the box like a jack-in-the-box and are able to surprise the whole world with what they’re able to come up with.
Jonathan Schwab: This is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael Steiner: And I’m Yael Steiner, and today is going to be a bit different than our usual episode, but it is also going to be extremely special. We have the immense honor of hosting our education lead, Dr. Henry Abramson, for a discussion, a bit of reflection on our series on Jewish life in the Americas now that it’s coming to a close. It’s really a wonderful opportunity for all of you to get to know the Henry that we’ve gotten to know, who is an extremely wonderful person and amazing resource for us on this podcast. I personally feel very honored to call him a colleague, maybe as a bit of a stretch. But thank you. And we would love to hear from you, Henry, what you’ve thought of what we’ve done so far, the stories that we’ve told, and I know Schwab has his own agenda for this little catch-up.
Jonathan Schwab: But it’s mutual.
Henry Abramson: To give Henry’s full biography beyond just being the education lead and such a valuable resource to us, he’s the dean of Lander College for Men at Touro University. He has many, many lectures on Jewish history on YouTube, which are really popular — check them out. If you’re interested in this podcast, you will really enjoy his material on YouTube. And like y’all said, we’re super grateful to him for the really helpful framing that he often does for us, the directions that he gives us for research. So it’s so exciting for us to have him on this podcast here.
[Note: the “Henry’s full biography” line above was spoken by Jonathan Schwab in the source; speaker labels overlapped at this point in the original recording and are reproduced as heard.]
Henry Abramson: I feel deeply honored, and everything you said about me, I would magnify multiples to talk about you, because I’m so proud of what you’ve done with the tiny little suggestions I’ve given. It’s really amazing. It gives me tremendous personal satisfaction to hear how you investigate these areas that would not necessarily have occurred to me at all, and I say, wow, look what they discovered. And one of the things — I think your podcast is so much fun to listen to, all the way back from the first season, because you have this tremendous joy of discovery and your sincere interest in actually learning this history and finding out these amazing things about the story of the Jewish people. It’s infectious, and I feel it too. I am ignited by the fires that you start.
Yael Steiner: I do want to say one thing.
Henry Abramson: Probably shouldn’t say that, ’cause I’m Canadian and we just had all those terrible forest fires, but you know.
Yael Steiner: I was going to ask, as a Canadian, how did this summer of America 250 sit with you? I know you’re now an American citizen, so —
Henry Abramson: You know, I have to say that you’re asking more of a personal question than I would normally share on a podcast. But I will say that I really love Canada, and my wife does as well. It was a great place to grow up, and we spent our early adult years there. That’s really lovely. Even though we never really thought we would become citizens — we always thought we were going to go back to Canada at some point. At a certain point we realized, no, this is now our new home, and we’ve cemented that.
Yael Steiner: Great. Well, we’re happy to have you, both on the podcast and in the US.
Henry Abramson: You guys did a great job with that season on American Jews. Fascinating. I especially enjoyed the way in which you reach deep into the mindset of the Jews living in those times, particularly those Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition hundreds of years later. I think you really made history alive by giving us a sense of what their Weltanschauung was, what their worldview was, and their consciousness of really being on the run for generations. Incredible how that must have affected them.
Yael Steiner: As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and I know Schwab is as well, that is with me all the time. My family’s Jewish heritage, Jewish experience, and particularly Jewish trauma is with me all the time, consciously or unconsciously. And I have to assume that the same was true of the descendants of those who fled the Inquisition. It does not seem to me as though that could have evaporated from their consciousness. So in the way that shapes me as an American Jew and my experience in my day-to-day life, I’m sure that it did the same for them.
Henry Abramson: Very deep thought, and I think absolutely correct. It would even be compounded, I think, in the period of the Inquisition, because of course it didn’t expire until the nineteenth century. So you’d always have to be, to a certain degree or another, hiding.
Yael Steiner: Looking over your shoulder.
Henry Abramson: One of the big differences about America is that, at least in theory and for the most part in practice, Jews can simply just come out and be Jews. Doesn’t matter what other people think — this is who we are. And I think that’s an amazing gift that America has given to the Jewish people.
Jonathan Schwab: It’s very interesting, thinking about the arc of this whole season — this is the first time we’ve done this, sort of telling one continuous story, focusing on one place and how it’s developed over history. We usually bounce around a lot more. But the figure that emerges to me as the center of the entire story, which is interesting because that wasn’t the plan going in, is Emma Lazarus, because she speaks so strongly and is so closely associated with American ideas. And this was surprising to me in doing the research, and surprising to Yael when we talked about it on the episode, that she’s a descendant of crypto-Jews — that she’s not, you know, her family had been here for so long, she’s not the people she spoke for. She’s not an Eastern European immigrant who came here in the 1800s, but she really ties together that whole history of the Inquisition having a really big impact on America and on American Jews.
Henry Abramson: Didn’t she have some Ashkenazi background as well, though? She’s kind of an interesting hybrid figure.
Jonathan Schwab: We downplay it in the episode.
Henry Abramson: Okay, but no, I think you’re absolutely right. And it’s amazing — I used this phrase a little while ago, this tremendous gift that America gave to the Jews with the possibility of self-determination as a Jewish people. The Jews also gave back, and the Jews also helped America define itself. Lazarus in particular is someone who, with an amazing insight and poetic genius, was able to encapsulate this vision of what America was all about, and really had tremendous impact on this country for a century or perhaps more. I’m not sure we can say her message resonates the same way in the twenty-first century as it did for much of the twentieth, but nevertheless, one young Jewish poet was able to encapsulate the values of a nation and help crystallize that vision for the entire country, saying, yeah, this is who we are as Americans. What that Jewish girl said, that’s us. That’s an amazing thing that it happened. And she’s not the only one — Spielberg and Seinfeld and so many other Jews have helped Americans understand themselves.
Yael Steiner: A lot of the music was playing during some of the July Fourth celebrations and the fireworks, and I was thinking about the Gershwins and all the — I mean, you said Spielberg already, but the people who wrote the canonical music and the canonical films, and to a certain extent some of our canonical literature, Philip Roth and Arthur Miller and a variety of different people who have written these very important pieces of American culture, are Jews. And whether or not people outside of our little circle acknowledge them as Jews is an open question, but the American experience has been forged by Jews.
Henry Abramson: Absolutely. A lot of sciences too.
Yael Steiner: Mm-hmm. Jonas Salk.
Jonathan Schwab: I was going to say — I think that we’ve been emphasizing, especially in talking about America this whole summer, how powerful and unique that is. My question is, is it actually that unique? Is it true that Jews have shaped America and American culture and ideals to an extent that has not been true for any other country aside from Israel?
Henry Abramson: No, I think you could find lots of examples like this. I think you could say it about nineteenth century Germany. I think you could say it about early twentieth century Poland as well. There are a lot of places — I think this is more of a phenomenon of immediate post-emancipation effects. There’s this metaphor you see occasionally — I can’t remember off the top of my head who really coined it — the metaphor of a coiled spring, where you have the Jews who are artificially restrained by a series of antisemitic discriminatory legislation or social discrimination, and as soon as the society allows the Jews to express themselves more fully, they bound out of the box like a jack-in-the-box and are able to surprise the whole world with what they’re able to come up with — their innovations in culture and science and technology and things like that. That’s the metaphor, I think, and you can see that to one degree or another through much of Jewish history. You see it even in eleventh century Ashkenaz. You certainly see it in twelfth century, or tenth century Spain, the beginning of the Golden Age. Whenever Jews get just a little bit more freedom, we say, wow, and we reach out, and we are a very creative people. We do have certain cultural advantages because of our long-standing emphasis on the value of education, literacy, numeracy, and so on, and our much more global consciousness, because we understand ourselves as a global diaspora quite naturally, which is not something that comes naturally to, let’s say, a Bavarian peasant, or an Irish coal worker. He doesn’t necessarily think of himself as part of a global culture, whereas Jews have learned to think that way. So we have certain cultural advantages that give us the ability to express ourselves and to make a larger impact on a larger society. I think that’s really what happened in America, and perhaps over a more sustained period of time than in most other historical moments, because besides the phenomena I’ve already described, you also have an immigrant generation of young people — the people who came to this country after 1881 in particular tend to be in their twenties. They’re quite often single, but also came in small young family units — young families saying, we can’t live anymore in the Russian Empire, let’s try it over here. Like my grandparents — one set of grandparents, my grandfather came over and then he brought my grandmother over and married her in Canada. The other two — my grandmother was a good example of this. She was kind of a rebel, and at age eighteen she insisted on leaving. She met her husband, my grandfather, on the boat. So this is a generation of young people who are thinking of themselves as approaching a society where they will be allowed to do what they want. And my gosh, did they ever. They struggled, of course, for decades, and in many cases it is their children, born in America with the cultural skills of the language and the lay of the land, who are able to finally act on the kind of impulse that their parents embodied. But I think that’s really what we see in America, because we’ve had well over a century of that kind of time, which we didn’t always have in previous moments of creative outbursts. Well, sorry for the very long answer — I was on a riff.
Yael Steiner: I thought of one other Jewish cultural artifact that we didn’t cover in our prior conversation, which is Superman. He is not canonically Jewish — he is canonically alien and an outsider — but created by Jewish artists, growing out of the ideas of —
Jonathan Schwab: The comic book, yeah.
Henry Abramson: He is totally Jewish. What is his native name? That is totally a theophoric name — that’s a completely Semitic name. My daughter has a similar theophoric name. You would pull that out and say, that’s a Jew for sure.
Yael Steiner: Right. And that’s, you know —
Jonathan Schwab: Also a Jewish name if you pronounce it the way it’s meant to — Superman, Superman, Batman, Spiderman.
Yael Steiner: That’s true. Supermen. One of my favorite jokes on Friends is where Phoebe asks why it’s not pronounced “Spider Man,” and Chandler says, “It’s not his last name — it’s not like his name is Phil Spiderman.”
Henry Abramson: That’s really funny. I do think — this is nothing I’ve researched, so I don’t know for sure — but the German original of Superman is Übermensch. And I always wonder if the creators of Superman were thinking, no, this is the real Übermensch. You want an Übermensch, I’ll give you an Übermensch.
Yael Steiner: You want to make me an Untermensch, I’ll give you an Übermensch.
Henry Abramson: Yeah, we should probably translate some of those terms — Übermensch, from Nietzsche, the whole idea of creating the super race and the superman who was going to dominate the Untermenschen, the lower peoples. The Jews were typically associated with the Untermenschen, right at the very bottom. So the Übermensch is like someone heroic, and, well, of course make him Jewish.
Yael Steiner: I think one of the things we talked about in the various Americas episodes is that Jews in America were not emancipated in a traditional sense. There was no legal structure to emancipate them from — even though their freedom and citizenship came about at the same time as the French Jews, who were the first ones to be formally emancipated, American Jews never transformed from one thing to another. They were citizens from day one, the same way everybody else was. And I think that gives the existence of a Jew in America a very different springboard than a Jew anywhere else.
Henry Abramson: I think that’s quite true. The debate that goes on of “America is anders,” that America is different — is it really different? Well, there are some things that are quite different. I mean, even thinking about — you mentioned Holocaust survivor grandparents — my father and I grew up as free people, grew up without really knowing antisemitic prejudice or pressure or discrimination. We obviously had our little encounters — someone keyed my car once, things like that — but the idea is that that’s a different kind of mindset, if no one ever has to have “the talk” with you. I’m not sure we can say that with the same degree of confidence for, unfortunately, the next few generations of American Jews. Things are maybe different now.
Yael Steiner: We’re definitely living at a unique moment in American history and world history. I think probably most people think that at some point in their lives — none of us really know what the tipping point is. But it is interesting to me, as someone who has memories of growing up in America for a significant amount of time now, both as a child and as an adult, that this moment in my life — this America 250 — which is by far the most formalized moment of celebrating America in my lifetime — the post-9/11 era was a different way of celebrating America. To me, this is the moment that feels the most fraught for American Jewish life in my conscious lifetime, and yet it is the season in which I have spent the most time celebrating America and celebrating being American. So it’s fascinating to me that these two things are converging right now, and I wonder how many of my peers did not feel compelled to partake of this particular summer of celebration as much, because of how they feel now about being American Jews compared to how they may have felt ten or fifteen years ago.
Henry Abramson: Fascinating observations. Thought-provoking.
Yael Steiner: That being said, I think there is so much in my life today, and I hope going forward, that is wonderful about being an American Jew. I have so much gratitude to this country — multigenerational gratitude to this country — and there are so many things about Jewish life in this country that I still have yet to learn, and I think will only increase my appreciation. We kind of had to cut things off basically at the twentieth century. As we hop into the next season and the next century of time, what do you think are some other episodes of American history that deserve reflection?
Henry Abramson: Well, there’s so much to talk about, no question. But I’ll caution you that this is Jewish History Nerds, not Prophecy Nerds — that’s down the hall, separate podcast, they’re still working on their Past and Present Nerds. But we’re definitely going to reach more deeply into this. I just think there are so many exciting things we can touch on, we can explore. I’m also sort of directing my mind right now towards Antarctica — the whole story of Jews in Antarctica is amazing as well. So we’ll do our best to represent Jewish history all over the world, even on the southern continent.
Yael Steiner: I’m going to have to ask you to dive into that a little bit. Who are these Jews that are in Antarctica, and how do I meet them?
Henry Abramson: So for some reason, Jewish explorers from Antarctica come either from Brooklyn or from New Jersey. There are tons of them from those two places, including one named Ike Schlossberg, for whom there is a mountain range and an inlet named — Cape Schlossberg. And he actually planted a B’nai B’rith flag in South America. Someone commented, does that mean we own it now? I don’t think so. But there are lots of Jews who have really been on the bleeding edge of exploration, even to the southern continent, the ice, and even, of course, into space.
Jonathan Schwab: I was going to say, I feel like once you do Antarctica, then the next destination is kosher riverboat cruises in space, and talk about Jewish space explorers and —
Henry Abramson: Planning for the twenty-second century, probably going with another history guide, but who knows. It’s really fascinating. There are so many Jewish explorers — if we wanted to do a whole season on the most bizarre Jewish explorers, you would not believe the stories I’ve learned about these individuals who pose as Muslim emirs in order to get through dangerous places, and they speak like twelve languages, and they’re able to go in and out of societies and hobnob with important people, and they end up becoming married into the royal family of Tahiti. I’m not making this up, by the way. Lots of really fascinating stories about Jewish explorers. And those Jews who went down to Antarctica — just absolutely incredible. One of them, Schlossberg, that I mentioned earlier — he made nine separate expeditions, the last of which he made when he was seventy years old.
Jonathan Schwab: Wow. This is like, we’re talking OG explorer of Antarctica.
Henry Abramson: And there are a lot of Jews in this story. Really, really fascinating. But too much for now.
Jonathan Schwab: Really interesting. I think it’s interesting — as we started planning this series on America’s Jews earlier in the year, as we got close to the two-fiftieth, I noticed a lot of other people had the same idea. I saw a number of different publications or versions of just, here’s America 250, here’s the Jewish contribution. So it was interesting to know we’re not the only ones to talk about 1654 and the twenty-three Jews from Recife who landed in New York, which was New Amsterdam at the time. But it was interesting, then — what are a couple of stories that do appear in frequent places that we didn’t cover? Listeners should feel free to write in if there’s a story elsewhere that we didn’t get to — happy to do an episode on it. We didn’t talk about the Civil War. We didn’t talk about General Grant expelling — trying to expel the Jews from Georgia, which I think is very frequently one of the episodes that makes it onto the recounting of Jewish life in American history. And like y’all said, I think we focused more on early America than recent, and we didn’t talk a lot about Jewish contributions in science, technology, a little bit about entertainment. But if there are other things that were missed, we’re happy to go back and do another America’s series. We don’t need to wait two hundred fifty years for it, though.
Yael Steiner: What I think is really interesting about what you said about this explorer Schlossberg is that Jews going to Antarctica is almost taking the Jewish American experience to its logical conclusion. It is not purely westward expansion, it is not strictly manifest destiny, but Jews, I think — and we talked about this with Ray Frank, and we talked about this in some other contexts — Jews were among the people who ventured west at the earliest times. We talked about how there was a Jewish community in Lancaster, which doesn’t seem very far west now but was at the time, and then it moves out to Cincinnati and further and further west. And I guess, where do you go once you’ve hit California? You go to Antarctica.
Jonathan Schwab: Antarctica.
Henry Abramson: The chosen frozen.
Yael Steiner: It’s the next phase of exploration. And so it makes sense to me. Looking forward.
Henry Abramson: We’ll have a lot of fun talking about it.
Jonathan Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael Steiner: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please give us a rating and review. It really helps new listeners find the show.
Jonathan Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything Unpacked related, and go to Spotify or YouTube to watch our latest videos.
Yael Steiner: Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you. Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner.
Jonathan Schwab: And by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Perra and Ari Schlacht.
Yael Steiner: We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.