Graduate Student Spotlights

Lori Ann Laster Researches Strategies to Combat the Erasure of Jewish Experience from the Multicultural Classroom

Multicultural initiatives in educational spaces regularly erase or misrepresent the Jewish experience, as well as neglecting to include antisemitism within their purview, and the Center for Jewish Studies has been working to address this erasure on campus and in higher education generally (see p. 11). Lori Ann Laster (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, graduate minor in Human Rights) takes on this challenge in her dissertation, currently titled “A Question of Faith: Critical Examinations of Religious Diversity in Education.” Laster traces her motivation for this project both to her own experience in the public schools, where her family had to petition to have absences for the Jewish holidays approved without penalty, where abstention from the school’s annual Christian holiday Lori Ann Laster observances was viewed with confusion, and her desire to write a class essay about the Holocaust was deemed inappropriate, as well as to her own experience as an instructor of multicultural children’s literature at several universities. Many of these courses tended to emphasize racial identity, relegating religiously marginalized, ethnoreligious diversity to only one unit. As Laster revised these courses about diversity to be more inclusive, and in particular to be more representative of religious minorities, she discovered that the “embedded ideological misconceptions and assumptions” that shaped her students’ readings of the assigned texts reflected their lack of religious literacy. “Deliberately acknowledging religion as a category of cultural difference in the multicultural classroom,” Laster argues, “could not be more urgent.” But religion, she notes, has been marked as inappropriate to discuss in educational contexts because of inaccurate and insufficiently nuanced assumptions about secularized public schooling. However, she observes, “While religion may have been explicitly erased from public school curricula, it remains embedded in its ethos and in the practices of mainstream culture,” a culture that still labels non-Christian identities as “other,” and that often labels them as un-American and a threat to the public good. Laster insists that even as White Christian Nationalist ideologies gain traction in American legislative and judicial activity, “Educators are uniquely situated to engage in transformative pedagogies that facilitate intercultural understanding, combat discrimination, and disrupt oppressive discourses.” Holocaust literature would seem to offer opportunities to engage in multicultural pedagogies that center the Jewish experience and engage directly with antisemitism. Laster’s current research, therefore, focuses on popular and award-winning Holocaust narratives for youth, setting their literary representations of Jewish figures alongside pre-service teachers’ written reader-responses to these Holocaust texts. Laster notes, however, that such Holocaust narratives suffer from a long history of having their Jewish particularity stripped away in the service of broader multicultural or universalist messages, beginning with The Diary of Anne Frank, where both Otto Frank (Anne’s father) and the original Dutch publisher questioned whether postwar Christians could read the diary as relevant to them, and concluded that Jewish particularity would not sell well to the general public. These concerns, Laster says, influenced the editing of the manuscript, its subsequent adaptations, as well as both the marketing and teaching of the book as a redemptive tale, making it an “ahistorical icon of optimism in American consciousness.”

Similarly, Jane Yolen’s 1988 middle-grade Holocaust novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic, was retitled and revised under the guidance of her publisher, Laster discovered in her archival research of the Yolen manuscripts in the Kerlan Collection housed in the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the University of Minnesota, in order to appeal to a mainstream audience. By contrast, Laster observes, Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, is less susceptible to such treatment, which she thinks helps explain why Maus was recently banned in a Tennessee school district whereas The Diary of Anne Frank, with its many erasures, continues to hold pride of place in the American classroom. Under the mentorship of her graduate minor advisor, Bruno Chaouat, Laster hopes to discover through her analysis of pre-service teacher reader-responses the potential that Holocaust literature might hold in centering Jewishness and the distinctiveness of antisemitism in the multicultural classroom, disrupting prejudicial discourses, even as she tries to determine the role it might have in actually affirming or perpetuating prejudicial discourses and antisemitic tropes. Is Holocaust literature an effective tool, she asks, in broadening the scope of multiculturalism, or is it yet another instance in which religious particularity and “otherness” is stripped away in the service of more conventionally acceptable multicultural messaging? Under what conditions does the teaching of Holocaust literature “whitewash history to make it palatable for mainstream consumption, and, in the process, reconfigure the Jew as the universal victim, erasing the particularity of their Jewishness, which is precisely ‘the difference’ that qualified Jews as hostile enemies and made them targets for systematic extermination by the Nazis”? Laster presented part of her dissertation research at the Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference in Georgia this past June, speaking on “The Affordances of the Fantastic to Legitimize Marginalized Faith-Based Identity and Cultivate Religious Literacy.” She will be presenting her research on Holocaust literature, “Holocaust Literature as Panacea: The Representation of the Destruction of European Jewry in Children’s Books,” at the Midwest Jewish Studies Association Conference in September.

Walter Francis (PhD candidate, History) has received one of only seven research fellowships awarded at the Joint Distribution Committee Archives for 2022-2023. As a recipient of the Ruth and David Musher/JDC Archives Regional Fellowship, Francis will conduct research toward his project, “Rebuilding Synagogues, Building Memory: Jewish Communal Reconstruction, Historical Memory, and Identity Formation in Postwar Tunisia, 1945-1967.” His aim is to investigate how Tunisian Jewish community leaders, after WWII, used JDC funding as well as JDC connections to other global Jewish institutions to rebuild spaces such as libraries, synagogues, cemeteries and war memorials in the hopes of carving out a space for Jewish life in independent Tunisia. He will be presenting his findings at the JDC headquarters in New York. The Joint Distribution Committee Archives hold records of Jewish activity in over 90 countries, from 1914 to the present, making it one of the most significant collections in the world for the study of modern Jewish history. Visit https:// archives.jdc.org/ to view galleries, exhibits, and topically arranged content, or conduct online research in the archives database of nearly 600,000 names linked to historic documents and client lists, as well as 77,000 digitized photographs.

Walter Francis Receives Research Fellowship at Joint Distribution Committee Archives

Walter Francis

Jeffrey Cross Jeffrey Cross (PhD candidate, Religions in Antiquity) traveled to Jerusalem this summer to study Dead Sea Scroll fragments at the Shrine of the Book (Israel Museum), as well as in the Israel Antiquities Authority Conservation Lab. He conducted his research there with the support and advice of Jonathan Ben-Dov, a senior scholar at Tel Aviv University and an expert on several of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments most relevant to Cross’s dissertation. In his dissertation, Cross examines the practice of scribal rewriting in the Second Temple period, focusing on two works found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: the Community Rule and the Damascus Document. Both of these texts contain the regulations for the halakhah and ritual observance of a Jewish community in Judaea during the Second Temple period. As Cross explains, “The intertextual and hermeneutical practice of scribal rewriting reveals the dynamism of Jewish literary culture in the Second Temple period and its ability to transform its inherited traditions to meet contemporary demands.” Cross argues:

In essence, rewriting is a type of intertextuality by which a scribal author puts two or more texts with varying claims to authority in dialogue with one another. A scribe can rewrite an older text or incorporate parts of that text into a new composition to clarify the older text, to subvert its message, to offer further support of its claims, or to expand or contract its scope of application in new circumstances. Since the settings in and for which these texts were produced were enmeshed in the political, cultural, and religious debates of the Second Temple period, the study of rewriting has much to contribute to an understanding of Second Temple Jewish social, cultural, and intellectual history.

A key challenge Cross faces in making his argument, which depends on being able to identify where manuscript versions are identical and where they diverge, lies in the material condition of the Dead Sea Scrolls he is studying. The manuscripts have disintegrated into fragments whose original arrangement must be hypothesized on the basis of damage patterns and the remaining discernable text, in those instances where there are no obvious points where the fragments can be rejoined. Cross emphasizes, “As an interpreter of these texts, I must constantly make judgments regarding how fragments should be positioned in relation to one another, how the surviving ink on the writing surface should be read, and what letters might have filled the gaps or small ink traces now present.” Hence the need to travel to Israel to examine them in person: “The most recent high-resolution photographs often prove sufficiently clear for me to confirm initial judgments without hesitation. But on many occasions the decay and fragmentation of the manuscript make even good photographs indecisive or ambiguous. In such cases in-person examination is essential because it can allow viewing from multiple angles or variation in modes of lighting and magnification.” Cross was supposed to travel to Jerusalem in summer 2021, with the support of the Theresa and Nathan Berman Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies, but the COVID Delta variant rendered travel impossible. He planned to go instead in January 2022, but the Omicron variant hit. He has now finally been able to conduct this crucial aspect of his dissertation research, research which is already being noticed within the scholarly community. In August Cross presented part of his findings at the 11th Congress of the International Organization for Qumran Studies (IOQS), held in Zurich, where he delivered his paper, “Paratextuality, Law, and History in the Cave 1 Rule Scroll.”