Survivor Talk with Esther Adler

RECENT LIBRARY PURCHASES CELEBRATE THE DIVERSITY OF THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE

BY DEBRA MANDEL

During the pandemic, Northeastern University’s library added new Jewish Studies books to its collection focusing on a broad range of topics and historical periods. I selected titles based on recommendations and reviews, including those from the Jewish Book Council and the Jewish Women’s Archives. I want to thank Deborah Levisohn Stanhill, Jewish Studies’ Administrative Specialist, for her engaging conversations about some of these books and her insights about emerging areas of research and scholarship in the department, such as diversity, equity and inclusion. Deborah also sent me H-NET updates for material I may not have discovered otherwise.

During the year I expanded the Jewish Studies Guide to better highlight collections and websites.

Here are seven recommended e-book titles. Each book is linked to the library’s catalog page; from there log in with your University credentials. For a complete list of new titles use this link.

• Danon, Dina. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir:

A Modern History. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2020. “Through the voices of both beggars on the street and mercantile elites, shoe-shiners and newspaper editors, rabbis and housewives, this book argues that it was new attitudes to poverty and class, not Judaism, that most significantly framed this Sephardi community’s encounter with the modern age.” • Eisenfeld, Susan. Wandering Dixie: Dispatches from the Lost Jewish South. Columbus, OH: Mad

Creek Books, 2020. “A Jewish Yankee journeys through the American South to explore the lesser-known Jewish culture, music, food, and history of the region; she engages with the civil rights movement and legacy of the Civil War and reckons with a changed perspective on her place in

American history.” • Gad, Mara. The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-

Race Jewish Girl. Chicago, IL: Bolden, 2019. “A memoir about a mixed-race Jewish woman who chooses to help her Great-Aunt Nette after she develops Alzheimer’s, a disease that erases Nette’s prejudices, allowing Mara to develop a relationship with the woman who shunned her in youth.” • Ivester, Jo. The Outskirts of Hope: A Memoir of the 1960s Deep South. Berkeley, CA: She Writes

Press, 2015. “Ivester uses journals left by her mother, as well as writings of her own, to paint a vivid, moving, and inspiring portrait of her Jewish family’s experiences living and working in an all black Mississippi town during the height of the 1960’s civil rights movement.” • Limonic, Laura. Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State

University Press, 2019. “Kugel and Frijoles offers new insight with which to understand the diversity of Latinos, the incorporation of contemporary

Jewish immigrants, and the effect of U.S. ethnoracial structures for immigrant assimilation.” • Parfitt, Tudor. Hybrid Hate: Conflations of

Anti-Semitism and Anti-Black Racism from the

Renaissance to the Third Reich. New York, NY,

United States of America: Oxford University Press, 2020. “…From the mid-nineteenth century to the

Third Reich Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse which combined the two fundamental racial hatreds of the west. While

Hitler considered Jews ‘Negroid parasites’, in Nazi

Germany as in Fascist Italy, through texts, laws and cartoons, Jews and Blacks were combined in the figure of the Black/Jew, the mortal foe of the

Aryan race.” • Rifkind, Donna. The Sun and Her Stars: Salka

Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of

Hollywood. New York: Other Press, 2020. “The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants.” It has been great getting to know some of you over the years! Happy reading.

Debra Mandel retired in July 2021 from Northeastern, where she was Director of the Recording Studios at the University Library and the Jewish Studies Librarian, as well as a member of the Jewish Studies Advisory Board and the Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Committee. Please see page 13 for a tribute to Mandel.

DEBRA MANDEL, LAUREL LEFF AND LORI LEFKOVITZ

A TRIBUTE TO DEBRA MANDEL

BY LAUREL LEFF

Debra Mandel has been the perfect person to serve with on a committee. I joined Northeastern’s Holocaust Awareness Committee in 2010. Debra had already been a member for two decades. During our decade together, Debra always volunteered for what she could do, and then did it, cheerfully and well. She never seemed to take a side and yet always made her views known. She made time for meetings, and could be counted on to attend the often elaborate and numerous events that constituted Holocaust Awareness Week. When we had a question, she provided the answer, links to the appropriate information appearing in mailboxes seemingly before the inquiry was finished. Debra has been committed to the committee’s mission and its members.

Debra has been the perfect person to work with on a project. When Jewish Studies received a small grant to digitize the library’s Holocaust Awareness Committee records and to develop a public website to accompany them, Debra of course volunteered. When a semi-finished product was dumped in her lap, she didn’t flinch or complain. She worked well with me, who had strong ideas about where the project should go, but knew nothing about the technical steps required to get there. And she worked well with a graduate student in public history, who knew lots about the technical requirements, but very little about the Holocaust. Debra bridged the gap without us even knowing there was much of one. Without her efforts, the site would never have launched.

Debra has been the perfect person to provide help as a librarian. When I started teaching a course on America and the Holocaust, I knew I wanted to use a lot of videos and I knew Debra could help me get them. Lucky for me, Media and Screen Studies, Music and Jewish Studies were her specialties as a Northeastern librarian. She tracked down everything I wanted and found things I wanted but didn’t know that I did. It wasn’t always easy. She located an American Joint Jewish Distribution fundraising film made in 1939 about the St. Louis, the ship with 900 Jewish refugees aboard, barred from landing in Cuba. I was delighted the library obtained DVDs of all these fairly obscure films, and Debra kept making suggestions for new ones. Then COVID hit. I was teaching remotely and not able to show a single DVD. Debra immediately went into action, getting streaming versions of everything I wanted, and, more impressively, getting the library to pay for them all. Other librarians might have been able to accomplish some of this, but only Debra could accomplish all of it in her sunny, unflappable fashion.

To evoke Mary Poppins, Deb is practically perfect in every way. Which is why it is so hard to face Debra’s well-deserved, yet distressing (to her colleagues) retirement. It is hard to imagine the Holocaust Awareness Committee without

her. It is hard to imagine Jewish Studies without her. It is hard to imagine Snell Library without her. It is hard to imagine Northeastern without her. She has been that integral to each of those institutions for over three decades.

We will miss her greatly and wish her the very best.

Laurel Leff is Professor of Journalism and core faculty in the Jewish Studies Program at Northeastern.

NEWS NOTES FROM THE LIBRARY

The Holocaust and Genocide Awareness Committee digital archive at Northeastern Library is now part of the

Digital Commonwealth

collection of Massachusetts, as well as the Digital Public Library of America. Congratulations!

Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, MA, has added a video from the Northeastern archives to their Rescuing Hope project. The project records the testimony of Temple members who are Holocaust survivors, or whose parents are survivors. Sam Natansohn, a survivor who spoke at Northeastern four times, the last in 2000, is the father of one of their members.

Brian Greene, Head of Information Delivery and Access Services at the University Library, will be the new Jewish Studies librarian, following Debra Mandel’s retirement.

The Jewish Studies Program’s collection of video recordings from the Morton E. Ruderman Memorial Lectures are now archived on the Digital Repository Service, and we expect them to also be added to the Digital Public Library of America.