Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Ofer Ashkenazi & Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography (SUNY Press, 2025)
Host: Amir Engel
Date: September 6, 2025

Overview

This episode features a discussion with historians Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan on their new co-edited volume, Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography. The conversation, hosted by Amir Engel, explores how photography serves as a vital—yet underanalyzed—source for Jewish historical scholarship. The guests discuss the challenges and possibilities of using photography for reconstructing Jewish experience, the complexities of defining “Jewish photography,” and the interplay between memory, history, and visual culture. Highlighted are the book’s guiding questions, diverse contributors, case studies, methodological debates, and the evolving role of visual media.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introductions and Scholarly Trajectories

[01:26–05:44]

• Ofer Ashkenazi: Historian at Hebrew University, specializes in German history, German-Jewish experience, Jewish filmmaking, and visual culture. Author of Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany.
• Thomas Pegelow Kaplan: Endowed Chair in Jewish History at University of Colorado; trained in Holocaust studies, shifted from perpetrator-focused to Jewish experience and agency, now emphasizes photography’s historiographical possibilities.
• Their collaboration leverages distinct backgrounds, offering a broad and multifaceted lens on how photography addresses Jewish history and memory.

Conception and Goals of the Book

[06:12–08:41]

• Not a typical conference volume; built instead via open call for essays to showcase the “state of the art” in the field.
• Contributors range from well-known scholars to emerging voices, each bringing fresh methodological perspectives.
• The aim: to stimulate debate, provide a resource for courses/seminars, and diversify approaches to Jewish photography and memory studies.

Photography and Historiography: Potentials and Pitfalls

[08:41–16:47]

• Photography as Historical Source:
  • 200 years of technological and cultural change; Jewish life extensively documented via photography.
  • Core question: How do historians responsibly use photographs as sources?
  • Volume opens with a dialogue (“What is Jewish photography?”) with scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, intentionally leaving room for varied answers.
• Written vs. Visual Sources:
  • Photos are often more numerous, authored by a wider array of people, and perceived as ambiguous or elusive.
  • There’s a need for improved “visual literacy” and methodologies in historical practice.
  • Both photography and texts require rigorous source criticism, but images prompt numerous layers of interpretation.

“Photographs seem to be more ambiguous, more elusive than text. I don’t think it’s really true, but they do give us a lot of leave for interpretations and we basically need to convince that our interpretation is the right one...”
— Ofer Ashkenazi [12:37]

• Resisting Over-Simplification:
  • The dominance of written sources historically marginalized the visual.
  • The book promotes equal attention and sophistication in “reading” photographs, urging caution against superficial or solely illustrative uses.

Defining “Jewish Photography”: Complexity, Context, and Debate

[16:47–22:38]

• Instead of essentializing, the book explores what “Jewish” means contextually—sometimes as a position in relation to non-Jewish societies, sometimes as something nuanced and shifting (e.g., Mizrahi vs. Ashkenazi, Orthodox vs. secular).
• Some essays argue that “Jewish photography” is defined by what could not be shown/documented, especially under persecution (e.g., in Nazi Germany).
• Includes photographs by and of Jews, as well as those by non-Jews, even perpetrators, for multidimensional analysis.
• The starting-point interview with Hirsch and Spitzer helps foreground these complexities, e.g. comparing school photos from ghettos and internment camps in different contexts.

“Even if the authors agree on what it means to have a Jewish point of view, this point of view itself varies and changes over time.”
— Ofer Ashkenazi [17:07]

Memory vs. History: Boundaries, Blurring, and Photography’s Role

[23:53–32:32]

• The interplay between memory and historiography has dominated scholarship for decades (Halbwachs, Nora), originally focused on texts but now increasingly on visuals.
• Photographs are vehicles for both collective and personal memory but also complicate false binaries of “objective record” vs. “subjective recollection.”
• Case studies from the book:
  • Dora Apel: Builds generational memory from family photos.
  • Noam Gal: Explores Yael Bartana’s creative reworking of Herzl imagery as radical memory intervention.
  • Daniel Magalow: On Jewish cemetery documentation photos post-Holocaust and their “proof” function.
  • Michelle Klein: Analyzes 19th-century family album portraits and the constructed nature of memory.
• The legacy of theorists like Barthes and Sontag is highlighted; photographs are “arguments about reality,” not neutral documents.

“A photograph is not an objective depiction of reality, but it’s an argument about reality. And historians should study this argument.”
— Ofer Ashkenazi [33:19]

Collections, Case Studies, and the Politics of Access

[36:21–42:38]

• The Meyer family collection at Haifa University is spotlighted: an extraordinary amateur photographic archive tracing German-Jewish experience from the 1890s to 1950s.
• Access and curation are political—what gets collected, preserved, digitized, and displayed reflects institutional and national agendas.
• Other examples: Hermolersky’s Palestine photographs, Jewish outcasts in non-European locales, Jewish photographers documenting African Americans in the U.S.
• These case studies demonstrate intersectionality, outsider perspectives, and the diversity of photographic narratives.

“There is a politics of what is accessible and how it is accessible. And this politics can be institutional politics, can be national politics...”
— Ofer Ashkenazi [37:07]

Contemporary Visual Culture and Digital Challenges

[43:47–48:38]

• The current age’s digital explosion creates excess images and problems of curation.
• Unlike limited, curated historical albums, social media produces overwhelming quantities, much unfiltered.
• Anticipation that AI will assist future historians with sorting and analyzing this abundance.
• The book’s methodological tools are positioned as more relevant for pre-digital and early digital eras, but with lessons applicable to today’s visual culture overload.

“When I look at, at photos from the 1920s, 1930s, even amateur photographs, someone had to make some choices… In current social networks… thousands of photos all the time…”
— Ofer Ashkenazi [46:12]

Looking Ahead: Current and Future Research

[48:38–50:58]

• Ofer Ashkenazi: Planning a project on amateur photography across Nazi-occupied Europe; also co-writing an “environmental history of German Jews.”
• Thomas Pegelow Kaplan: Two projects—on postwar protest movements’ use of photographic language of genocide across the Atlantic, and a global history of the Holocaust emphasizing the role of photography.

Notable Quotes

• “If you read the book, you can see that we have different attempts to tackle exactly this question [What is Jewish Photography?].”
  — Ofer Ashkenazi [09:23]

• “We are often not the first in terms of entering innovative debates over theory… it’s often the same old use of photographs for illustrative purposes and whatsoever.”
  — Thomas Pegelow Kaplan [14:49]

• “Some of our colleagues… would be much more comfortable with notions like ‘Jewish photography’… but others [use the book to] problematize it. That’s exactly right.”
  — Thomas Pegelow Kaplan [19:16]

• “Historians now, instead of simply using [photography] for illustrative purposes… the hope is to problematize this distinct kind of connection and propose various ways in which to do so.”
  — Thomas Pegelow Kaplan [33:33]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:26 – Introductions and scholarly backgrounds
• 06:12 – Conception and aims of the book/project
• 08:41 – Photography’s status in historiography
• 12:25 – Written vs. visual sources and reading photographs
• 16:57 – What is “Jewish photography”?
• 23:53 – Memory vs. history debates and photography
• 36:21 – Notable photographic collections and access
• 43:47 – Visual culture today: digital abundance and new challenges
• 48:38 – Future research directions

Tone & Language

The conversation is academic and collegial yet approachable. The hosts and guests are candid about disciplinary limitations, eager to embrace methodological complexity, and committed to prompting new debates rather than settling old ones with oversimplifications. They highlight the book’s role as a “conversation-starter” and “toolkit,” relevant for students, teachers, and researchers.

Summary prepared for listeners or readers who seek a comprehensive understanding of how photography intersects with Jewish history, memory, and the evolving work of historians.