My research takes as its starting point the rich and varied lives lived by Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the outbreak of World War II. Collective memory of the Jewish world of early-twentieth-century Eastern Europe is often overshadowed by the subsequent events of the Holocaust or rendered flat by an idyllic view of conditions in the alter heym – the old world. By focusing on the vibrant religious and cultural life led by Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust, my research honors the complexity of the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe and brings it to life for people today.

Occult Modernities: Hidden Realities in East European Jewish Culture, 1880–1939

My dissertation, “Occult Modernities: Hidden Realities in East European Jewish Culture, 1880–1939,” explores how East European Jewry and its North American diaspora engaged with modern occult currents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This engagement is taken as a lens to understand the broader social and religious changes that East European Jews underwent in these years. Jews in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe and North America turned in increasing numbers to occult phenomena such as spiritualism, hypnotism, psychical research, and fortune-telling. For those who engaged with them, the hidden realities represented by occultism conveyed practical knowledge, entertainment, assurance, and the possibility of belief in a higher reality. Occult trends were widely disseminated among East European Jewry and its North American diaspora, and the chapters of this study draw on a diverse array of source material, including the multilingual Jewish press, religious literature, and modern Yiddish literary and philosophical works. These sources are read with an eye toward understanding the place of occultism in modern Jewish life.

Jews and the Spiritualist Movement

My second research project looks at the forgotten history of Jews and the spiritualist movement. Spiritualism, which flourished from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, argues that the dead survive in spirit form and may be contacted by the living, often through the intercession of a medium. Jewish men and women, rabbis and laypeople, practiced and debated spiritualism across six continents. Jews often took up spiritualism for the same reasons as their non-Jewish counterparts, drawn in by the seemingly empirical proof it offered of religious beliefs of the afterlife, a desire to contact deceased loved ones, or mere curiosity. In other cases, Jews embraced spiritualism with the explicit aim of revitalizing what they described as a moribund Judaism. Many Jews played an active role as mediums and investigators and left behind a distinctly Jewish spiritualist literature in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, and English.

To date, I have published three peer-reviewed articles on Jews and the spiritualist movement, along with several popular publications, and lectured widely on the topic.

Yiddish Press Culture

Thousands of Yiddish periodicals were published in Eastern Europe in the early-twentieth-century. These journals, newspapers, and magazines capture the rich political, religious, and cultural diversity of Jewish daily life before the Holocaust.

My current research focuses on Yiddish illustrated magazines published in interwar Poland. Journals such as Ilustrirte vokh, Velt-shpigl, Di vokh, Di panorame, and Idishe bilder utilized new print technologies to produce popular publications of unprecedented visual quality. Yiddish illustrated magazines vividly encapsulate the ongoing cultural transformation of East European Jewry in the interwar period. Traditional Jewish concerns are discussed alongside articles on new technologies and scientific discoveries, and photographs of scantily-clad dressers and Hollywood film stars appear several pages down from images of hasidic rebbes. Many of these magazines were marketed at women readers, to whom they introduced the latest cultural trends from Western Europe and, increasingly, the United States.

Hillel Zeitlin

I am an authority on the life and works of Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942), a writer and Jewish thinker active in early-twentieth-century Warsaw. A prolific writer in Hebrew and Yiddish, Zeitlin, like many of his contemporaries, received a traditional religious education prior to making an adolescent break with religion. Yet unlike his peers, he subsequently reembraced religious life and authored numerous works in the spirit of early-twentieth-century mysticism. His eclectic religious identity as a modern hasidic Jew positioned between the reactive traditionalism of hasidic Orthodoxy and secular Jewish modernity continues to inspire contemporary readers who have rediscovered his writings in recent years.

My research on Zeitlin focuses on his conception of dreams and prophecy. My article “‘From Time to Time I Dream Wondrous Dreams’: Esotericism and Prophecy in the Writings of Hillel Zeitlin,” published in the journal Correspondences, uncovers the contemporary occult currents underpinning much of Zeitlin’s writings on clairvoyant states. Together with Prof. Jonatan Meir, I have also written on the spiritual fraternities Zeitlin sought to organize in interwar Poland.

I am committed to making Zeitlin’s writings more accessible to Hebrew and English readers. To that end, in 2020 I published be-Hevyon ha-Neshamah (In the Secret Place of the Soul, with Jonatan Meir), a Hebrew volume of Zeitlin’s writings on dreams and religious experience, and have translated several of his essays into English (available here).