Thanks, all, for coming to THATCamp Jewish Studies, and particular thanks to Natasha Perlis for her help in putting it together and to Rona Sheramy for (among other things) getting us an extra projector at the last minute.

Please take half a minute to fill out an evaluation for THATCamp Jewish Studies — there are only two fields required: which THATCamp you went to and how useful you thought it was.

There’s space, of course, for you to say more, so feel free to wax loquacious. All evaluations are anonymous and are publicly available at j.mp/thatcampresults. Evaluations help future THATCamp organizers see what mistakes to avoid and help THATCamp funders judge whether it’s a worthy cause to support.

Enjoy the rest of AJS!

During Laura Leibman’s session on Jewish identity and the digital humanities, we discussed the potential of information technology, online content, and applications to either perpetuate or counter ideas about racial categories. When viewing films or using online archives, it is easy to assume that our students have context that is evident to us, when in fact they have not absorbed this context. In this post, I direct other participants to a site that is a promising example of how to address this issue. I mention the site because, this morning, several THATCamp participants (the majority of whom are scholars of Jewish studies) expressed interest in questions of memory, voice, and racial identity. As an English literature scholar who also works on Caribbean literature, I confront similar challenges of bringing together piecemeal information and “lost” voices, since West Indian and colonial American slaves’ “autobiographical” accounts were often mediated by white editors. Recently, I was impressed by the project of Cassandra Pybus, a professor of history at the University of Sydney. Her Web site is blackloyalist.info. It is an “online repository” for fragmentary items of information concerning individual black slaves who supported the British forces during the Revolutionary era and were liberated and evacuated in 1783. In her “About” section, she includes a column in which she explains “How Assumptions Are Made.” It enumerates different assumptions that researchers use in tracing kin relationships among slaves for whom genealogical information is limited or compromised. Using similar interfaces and categories, we can provide context for our students and general visitors to our online sites and content.

The site is:

www.blackloyalist.info/

If anyone would like further information on this, my e-mail address is nmwright@uchicago.edu

How about sharing those tools we find useful when teaching and researching?  It has become clear to me by reading people’s suggestions for panels, that I am not aware of all the tools people are using.  Come ready to share one tool with the rest of us!

I would like to propose a session in which THATCampers could discuss the relationship between Jewish Studies and recent debates about race and ethnicity in digital humanities.  I am particularly interested in talking about how certain platforms (digital archives, gaming, blogs, online genealogy sites, social media?) present either opportunities or pitfalls for thinking about the social construction of Jewishness.

On the positive side, I am curious about how digital humanities offers opportunities to discuss the boundaries of our discipline and who gets included and excluded from the rubric of “Jewish Studies.”  I mainly work, for example, on the Sephardic Diaspora in the Americas, so I tend to think about how scholarship can either reify or reject mythical views of authenticity of a “pure” Jewishness that is thought to have existed before the Sephardic displacement into the Americas or in medieval Iberia prior to forced conversions.  How might software (such as Omeka) that encourages visitor participation, for example, allow people visiting online archives to contest the definitions of either “Jews” or “Jewishness” in meaningful ways?  Likewise, how can we use online gaming to help raise questions about identity?  (Here I am thinking about games like Trading Races and AllLookSame.)  Does the digital world offer new ways to challenge students to think about the history of how Jews created their identities in relationship to and in dialogue with others?

I’d also like to talk about potential pitfalls of the digital world with respect to identity making.  To what extent extent are “charged assumptions” about race, ethnicity, or Jewishness replicated in either the digital world through systems, codes, or tools (See Koh Slide 31)?  How does digitizing Jews relate to larger debates about Race in the Digital Humanities and what it means to “digitize” race or ethnicity?