Jewish Studies Engages in the Digital Humanities, and a New Website is Launched BY SIMON RABINOVITCH
Fall 2020 featured a new Northeastern Jewish Studies class, and the launch of a new website by Northeastern students and faculty exploring the history of the Jews of Boston. The class, Digital Histories of Ethnic Boston, focuses on the Jewish community when it is taught by Jewish Studies faculty. The class uses Boston’s Jewish history to teach digital humanities tools and scholarship, and digital history as a method to study Boston’s Jewish history. Given the strength of Northeastern’s History Department in digital humanities, the class was designed to be taught about any or all of Boston’s ethnic communities, depending on the specialty of the instructor.
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In our class, I used the city of Boston as a laboratory to explore Jewish history and experiment with digital humanities. With a 360-degree camera and a spreadsheet of addresses of former synagogues and Jewish sites, we went by foot into East Boston, Beacon Hill, the North End, South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester. We also benefited from the expertise of specialists at Northeastern and in Boston. We had workshops (by Zoom) with pros from the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group and its Archives and Special Collections, with digital humanities specialists in the NUlab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, with a professional cartographer from Beehive Mapping, with an archivist and educator at the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at New England Historic Genealogical Society, and with colleagues in the History Department who specialize in spatial history and 360 degree reconstructions.
At least by measure of the sophistication of the students’ work (and I hope too by how much they learned), the class was a success. In December we launched the site DHJews of Boston that exhibits the two collaborative projects created in this intimate seminar. Harrison Beiser, Kayla Lavelle, and Shira Weiss worked together to create a digital story-map called Mapping Shared Spaces: A Visual History of Boston’s Black and Jewish Communities. This interactive story-map allows readers to explore neighborhoods where Boston’s Jews and Blacks lived together during different periods of Boston’s Jewish history. The map’s narrative begins with Black sacred spaces that became synagogues in today’s Beacon Hill (formerly West End), and moves on to synagogues and Jewish communal and educational institutions that became predominantly Black churches and communal institutions in the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester. One institution, Freedom House, served as a center of both Black and Jewish activism and integration, and is still an important community institution in Dorchester. In building the map, students used their own photographs (still and 360), Northeastern’s Archives and Special Collections, and Google’s 360 mapping, in addition to extensive reading and research. The result is a beautiful tour of these important shared spaces. Jasper Trouerbach mapped the migration of Boston’s Jewish community in a different way, using historical data about the founding and closing of synagogues, using the software program Tableau. In Shifting Neighborhoods: How Boston’s Jewish Communities Moved, 1850-2000, Trouerbach created a series of maps and explanations plotting the Jewish community’s decade-by-decade migration within and out of Boston. From Trouerbach’s visualizations, a clear picture emerges of the Jewish community’s steady suburbanization. These maps and charts show the movement of Jews outward, from the North End to the West End, into newer suburbs eastward into East Boston and Chelsea, and westward into Brookline. Most significantly they reveal the steady founding of new synagogues progressively southward in the city, first in the South End, then Roxbury, then Dorchester, then Mattapan (which was at the time part of Dorchester). As Trouerbach points out, Jews began
leaving the city, including fairly newly established neighborhoods, in significant numbers beginning in the 1930s, well before government engineered redlining in the late 1960s had a devastating effect on the remaining Jewish community in the southern part of the city. (Read Trouerbach’s perspective below.) What I love about this ongoing project is how it will grow as students create new exhibits in different classes focusing on the digital history of the Jews of Boston. For example, Nate Gillin, a student in my spring 2021 class “Jews in the Modern World,” created a digital story-map called Boston’s Jewish Advocate: A Visual History of a Publishing Landmark. Gillin constructed an interactive map that narrates the history of Boston’s Jewish Advocate newspaper
from its origins as a source of revenue for the city’s Jewish hospital, to its association with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, to its role in drawing out Louis Brandeis’s Zionism, and ultimately to its fading significance. Publishing for well over a century, the Jewish Advocate was a key element of both Boston Jewish and American Zionist history, and Gillin used his own photos, as well as archival, digital, and print sources, to create this compelling exhibit. The creativity and diligence of these phenomenal Northeastern students shines in all of these projects. I hope the public learns from and enjoys them as much as I did. Simon Rabinovitch is Associate Professor of History and core faculty in the Jewish Studies Program.
CREATING THE DHJEWS OF BOSTON WEBSITE A STUDENT’S PERSPECTIVE BY JASPER TROUERBACH
My project, which focused on changing Jewish communities throughout Boston’s history, was a great way to combine my Economics degree and my passion for Jewish Studies, by looking at how economics affects demographics and mobility. It was interesting to look at how the experiences of the Jewish community moved them in different ways as the city grew and to see that Jews made decisions on where to live based on economic factors, in addition to cultural and religious factors. Of course, our field trips to areas throughout old Boston were a great bonding experience, as our small group of students would walk and learn the lesser-known history of older neighborhoods like the North End, and then stick around for a slice of pizza. In February I spoke about the project at a College of Social Sciences and Humanities admissions event showcasing undergraduate research. Being able to present this project, and speak about my experiences at Northeastern to incoming students, provided a book-end to my college career that had ended feeling slightly off, due to graduating during the COVID pandemic. The incoming students asked great questions, focusing on how to navigate college,
and how to jump into their passion project as I had. I emphasized that building a personal connection with my professors and department, as I did with Professor Rabinovitch and the whole Jewish Studies Program, was the key to bringing my interests into my work. When our class began, none of us knew what we would focus on, and it was by learning research and visualization tools that I was interested in, as well as bringing in experience from my co-ops, that I started to see my path forward. Professor Rabinovitch and I went back and forth on design and scope, and he always pushed me to look at the larger picture (surprise, surprise, the Jews of Boston can only be properly understood by looking through the broader lens of Jews in Massachusetts). I truly felt that in that class students and the professor were peers collaborating together and I consider it one of many highlights of my time at Northeastern University. Jasper Trouerbach graduated Northeastern in December ’20 with a degree in Economics and minors in Jewish Studies and International Affairs.
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