Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, "Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography" (SUNY Press, 2025)

Summary

---

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.

Transcript

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Part of legendary nights.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 lit. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Oh come on.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of the trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Whatever.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia Made to Travel hey, it's Ryan.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Now.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I was looking for fun ways to.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

So I thought it would be fun.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

If we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required new customer offer for first 3 months only Speed slow after 35gb of network's busy taxes.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

And fees extra See mintmobile.com Welcome to.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

The New Books Network.

[Amir Engel]

Hi everyone. My name is Amir Engel and I'm the Chair of the German Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm also currently a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Today I'm talking with Ofra Ashkenazi and Thomas Peglo Kaplan about their new book. Their new work, Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography came out with Suny recently 2025. Ofer Thomas, thank you so much for being here.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

[Amir Engel]

Before we start talking about the book and about the essays, perhaps I can ask you to introduce yourself and say a few words about who you are and how you made it this far.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

I'm Ofer Ashkenazi. I'm teaching history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm also the director of the Richard Kebner Minerva center for German History in Jerusalem. Currently I'm on sabbatical as the Mosse Visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

And I'm Thomas Peglo Kaplan. I'm the Louis P. Zinger Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado. I'm a Holocaust studies scholar by training, which started in Germany working with the late Reinhard RUP and also a little bit in Tubingen with Professor during man 12, now also retired. And I really kind of move from the more kind of traditional kind of German, German Jewish historiography into all the linguistic turn debates, how we historians called it like in the. In the 1980s, 1990s, and then kind of realized there are too many shortcomings. And so I got more interested in photography and I was very excited to kind of do take on this project with Ova.

[Amir Engel]

Okay, Ofer, can you tell us a little bit more about the kind of trajectory of your scholarly work? What were you interested? Where did you come from in terms of intellectually and scholarly?

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

So my training, so to speak, is in German history. And over the years I became more and more interested in Jewish aspects of German history and German Jewish, mostly German Jewish experience and mostly in times of extreme uncertainty, during times of historical shifts. The First World War and its aftermath around the early 1930s and ongoing towards the Holocaust persecution, forced migration and so forth. I was basically curious about various aspects of this Jewish, German, Jewish experience. But my books are mostly in visual. In the realm of visual culture. I wrote a lot about Jewish filmmaking in Germany and then photography, Jewish photography, exile photography and so forth. My previous book, which I co authored with Rebecca Grossman and Shira Marone and Sara Warbick Segev, is called Still Lives. Jewish Photography. Nazi Germany just came out a few weeks, a few months ago.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I think overall it was like little broader, kind of in a sustained focus. But I think kind of both of us kind of, you know, kind of signal and Schwein, whatever the much broader, broader kind of shift. If you just look in my kind of narrow field of Holocaust studies, kind of away from an overemphasis on the perpetrators in this sense. And I studied very closely when I did my doctorate at Chapel Hill with Chris Browning and Conrad Jarvis right away. And then two Jewish experience, suffering, but also agency. And that's kind of very much enshrined and can nicely be kind of studied from all kinds of angles in terms of photography.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Yeah, I think that when we started to think about this book, when we thought that we will have an edited volume which very broadly looks at what can we learn from photography on Jewish history and Jewish memory. I think we came from different backgrounds which really helped us to see a wider picture and to ask different questions, so to speak.

[Amir Engel]

So let's Talk a little bit about the coming about of this project. How did you start discussing it? There are quite a few. There's quite a number of people were involved in this project. You also have a conversation with several scholars to start with. How did this book actually come to be?

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I think one of the important aspects and then let ofer continue kind of was that it's not a conference volume. Right. I mean, we met at a conference, I remember, like Lessons and Legacy to strategize and talk about a little bit more. But really not a single paper was presented at this conference is in the volume. And then we did like a broader call, but Nova will continue in a second. But it was really like an idea to kind of, you know, capture kind of the various histographic and other kind of debates at the time, but also, of course, like stimulate more research and bring a broad array of scholars together.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Yeah, we really wanted to have, you know, to have a volume that will give us the state of the art in this field. So, you know, it could be taught in courses and seminars that deal with the topic at large. And therefore we didn't want to limit ourselves to a certain aspect of Jewish history or Jewish memory or a certain kind of photography. So the idea was to gather the, you know, the most interesting scholars active today. Not all of them could contribute to the volume, but we tried to have as many as we could of this group, as well as some younger scholars who just started or just were finishing their dissertation or a little bit after that and having something fresh or adding something fresh to the way we think of photography and history and memory. So the idea was to have both perspectives, the senior scholars who have been doing that for decades and have a very distinct idea of the way we need to look at it, and some younger scholars who bring fresh ideas and fresh methodological approaches to it.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

Right.

[Amir Engel]

So I would really want to go a little bit more into detail about that. But before we do so, I think it's worth just spending a few minutes talking about photography and photography and historiography. Photography is a relatively new kind of medium, but maybe you could just say with a few words something about the history of photography and more importantly, perhaps the role that photography has within historiography in the last, say, 10 years, and then we can go on, discuss the issue of Jewish photography. Is there even such a thing?

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

I would not go too much into the history of photography. I'll just say that we have photography for pretty much 200 years now, and there have been a lot of developments and different Stages, technology and the commercial aspects of photography and amateur photography and so on, so forth. We won't get into it, but we just say that it is with us for a long time. And since during this time a lot has happened in, in Jewish history, we have abandoned documentation and documentation of Jewish experience in photography. So it really is important for historians to use it and to use it properly. The question is, how do you use it properly? And here we wanted to start with a question without answers. So we started the book with a conversation with two prominent scholars in the field. We called it what is Jewish photography? What can we learn from it? And we talked with Mariana Hirsch and Leo Spitzer and we asked them these questions, or what can we learn from photography? What does it mean, Jewish photography? What does photography tell us about the connection between historiography and memory and so on and so forth? So we started with laying out the questions and actually we asked all of the authors to answer these questions directly or indirectly in their paper. So we have a big variety of answers to these basic questions. So I don't want to give you an, you know, the answer or one answer of that, but you, if you read the book, you can see that we have different attempts to tackle exactly this question.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

And of course there are, you know, again, many different ways in which to look at photographs and deliberately didn't want to kind of limit our contributors too much, but of course the distinct perspectives that we both embrace, kind of as the editors. So, for example, right, the important work of Ariel Azule was really kind of guiding. And of course the photographic events are not just the photographs in of itself, but the various contexts in which they were produced, exhibited, preserved, and all of it again to natural authors, to take a broader and distinct perspective. But it was also important for us, and readers will notice that too, that every single contributor also kind of take a look and practice photoanalysis also in the confines of the distinct chapter, along with all the other points that they wanted to make.

[Amir Engel]

Maybe to push on this issue just a little bit further. What is for you the difference, if there is at all between a written source and a visual source, a photo and a text?

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Well, I would say that at certain points in time you definitely had a lot more photos than texts, and you had photos that were authored and kept and organized by a much more diverse body of writers of history, so to speak, than you have texts. Especially when we are talking about the late 1920s onward, where cameras are becoming something that almost every middle class family in Europe has. And it goes beyond Europe. It goes to other places that you as living as well also you have a lot of that. On the flip side of that, it's obviously clear that we are very good in reading texts. We know it, we learned it in school, we learn it obviously as historians at the university. But we're not that good in reading photographs and we still need to work on developing methodologies to do that in, in a convincing way. And that would go to my third point, that photographs seem to be more ambiguous, more elusive than text. I don't think it's really true, but they, they do give us a lot of leave for interpretations and we basically need to convince that our interpretation is the right one, is a good one, is an interesting one, which is something that is not very easy to do with historians. I think it is changing in recent years, but it's not as easy as just to take a text and read it the way you want to read it and convince the, you know, the editor of a journal that this is the right way to do that.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

No, I agree. I mean despite the fact that there have been enormous changes, right. Also how we as historians kind of approach kind of photographs. And we are often not the first in terms of entering innovative debates over theory and whatsoever. You might disagree with me, but nonetheless I think they are still a little bit like, you know, and some scholars and colleagues have gone there, but then like you open like another survey study and whatsoever and it's the same old use of photographs like for illustrative purposes and whatsoever. So it's a little bit like, you know, we had like this big broha like in the 80s and 90s over feminist theory and we do the entire practice of doing history and whatsoever and see where we're at today. Unfortunately nowhere near any of those kind of major changes. But I think you know, both written text, but also photographs of course kind of require whatever source criticism doing like the, you know, kind of over indication of like citing it and of course, you know, also kind of analysis and, and that of course as ofa mentioned, kind of has to be kind of learned and studied. But, but there are some important differences. Like I would even say like saying that reading photographs like as already like has my antenna kind of go up to problematize because there's so much more in this kind of visual culture, ways of seeing and the gaze and all of it. It's very difficult to kind of capture in words in general. I think it's very important in these of course, the age old debates right over the primacy of the written over the visual and the dominance and what and stuff like that, and being kind of careful on that front and not privileging one or the other and seeing different ways and not too oversimplifying kind of ways at looking at photographs as we sometimes have at the undergraduate level. Very for this little catalog coming from high school and how to look at it, I think to problematize that and to bring it to kind of various other levels and see how it can be developed even further is overindicated in the future. Hopefully with some impulses from the book that would be fantastic.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

And I'm pretty sure, Amir, that the next question would be about the Jewish aspect of these.

[Amir Engel]

It is the next question. Guess that.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Do you want to ask that?

[Amir Engel]

No, no, go ahead. Okay.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

So I think this is another question that we were struggling with, or we asked the authors to struggle with. And some of them, like Lisa Silverman, for example, just jumped to this water head on and tried to theorize what does it mean to have a Jewish photography? Jewish here serves as a position vis a vision the non Jewish society, Which I think it's kind of a smart way to go about it. But obviously Jewish is much more than that because it's, you know, it's a position of, if you were in Europe in the 1920s, a position of being, you know, emancipated to be in a parvenu within the bourgeois society, sometimes being outsiders, sometimes suffering persecutions, but later on within the national context, this position totally changed within the Zionist movement and their power structure in Israel. But then there is another position of types of Jews, for example, Mizrahi Jews, as Gialon shows, or Orthodox Jews, which would be something else, as some of the authors here showed as well. So you see that even if the authors agree of what does it mean to have a Jewish point of view, this point of view itself varies and changes over time and so on and so forth. So we are not given, again, we're not giving one answer on how to look at it. But we show that there are different approaches that can be very productive for historians.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I can certainly see like, you know, readers or possible readers like picking up the book, kind of visit the missive, like overall remark and saying, oh gosh, like here we again have colleagues like essentializing kind of Jewish photography and whatsoever. But you know, once they start reading, they realize of course, that that's not what's kind of going on if everything we are problematizing that. And we deliberately kind of started also with that interview that Owe already mentioned. Like with Mayan Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, because we knew that they of course kind of would do exactly that, namely kind of problematize that notion and some of the examples they are giving. And again, readers will notice that kind of right away kind of comes from their important school photos and liquid time in which they're do this comparative angle, right? So photos from the kind of, you know, Warsaw Ghetto or Lodz ghetto and whatsoever kind of read along with photographs of like, you know, miss schooling situations. Right? Like with like boarding schools like you know, in the States, or like, you know, forced like Japanese internments camp and schooling situation there. So obviously already the comparison might make some of our colleagues in for example, Holocaust studies kind of squirrel a little bit and stuff like that. But again, problematizing this. And we push them on this, of course, and you know, the long debates over like Jewish space, for example, what it means, all of that. And I think that some of our colleagues in there, Michael Berkowitz, for example, would be much more comfortable with notions like of Jewish photography and where it came from and tying into bourgeois notions and all of it and stuff like that. But others to problematize it. But that's exactly right. I mean, undergrad readers might be kind of disappointed looking for the two kind of sentence explanation of whatsoever. But that's of course not the point of the book. Right? Again, to keep the conversation going, flowing, summarize it and also give new impulses that stuff idea behind it.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Yeah, I mean, obviously those undergrad students can find different answers and they might say that, you know, one answer is better than the other one. I mean, for one, we also have some scholars who say, well, the Jewish photography is the photographs that cannot show some things that non Jewish people can show, like Christoph Kreutzmuller and Teresa Zille. They show that there were things that Jewish photographers could not show, could not document in Nazi Germany and that would make their body of work so different than non Jewish people. But I just want to say that we also counted as Jewish photography or photography related to Jewish history photographs, they were taken by non Jews, sometimes by the persecutors of Jews. Just like in the case of Weizmann shows of the the perpetrators taking a photo of a Jewish rabbi. And from that he shows how much we can learn about the perpetrators point of view, but also about the Jewish experience vis a vis those perpetrators.

[Amir Engel]

Interesting.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. Lifelock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. @lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Gatorade is the number one proven electrolyte blend designed to hydrate better than water so you can lose more sweat and raise your game. Gatorade is it in you? @blinds.com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do you is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

[Amir Engel]

So, okay, so we problematized this notion of Jewish history in photography. I'd like to problematize a little further these other two terms that you use in the title and that is history in memory. I mean, these are two terms that were debated. I think it's late 90s, early 2000s, there was kind of a series of debates about memory of the Holocaust versus historiography of the Holocaust. How does this work kind of pertain to these questions? How does it complicate or make it more interesting, deeper? Where do you stand on this kind of where do your essays? Where does photography stand? And this questions of history versus memory.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

No, you're right. It's certainly kind of one of the kind of key overarching questions areas for kind of more than 20 years, kind of at this point kind of starting out with the more general contribution that everybody picked up on, from like Haltwox to Pianoir and the kind of usual suspect kind of side there. Also the very important work now moving more towards kind of history kind of per se, also German Jewish history of the late Alon Kon Canafino for example, but much of it. And that's where the book kind of fits in. And initially, of course, was much more driven by again looking at text and the early stages were quite crudely sometimes looking at newspapers and whatsoever. So in many ways one can argue that at this point we have what scholars like Chris Browning tapped aftermath kind of studies. So after 1945 being one of the most vibrant fields within the broader area like of Holocaust studies, again coming from all kinds of angles. And like for us, while as ofa nicely and correctly kind of pointed out, we didn't want like the Holocaust to drown out the distinct discussion was very important for us kind of in many ways. And there are of course important volumes directly devoted to kind of Holocaust and memory and then also some kind of on photography. And all of it would have been easy to do, but we wanted to have the kind of broader distinct perspective and enter in this way and also probe and go back. I mean we have like important kind of concept. We mentioned Mayana Rocha's work kind of already, you know, post memory is kind of one of them, right? Also in terms of generational trauma and how it is transmitted, that's of course an important one. She is coming more from literature, but nonetheless it's of course an interdisciplinary conversation. And we wanted to probe her on this one as well. Also in the context of other topics, for example, also a little bit ongoing conflict, of course that's so important in Israel, Palestine right now. And like works in which like that's what's the point kind of she is trying to make and which photographs and others and terms can also do some repair work and bring back together and some of which is drawing from feminist traditions. But again, like our various authors take a whole array of distinct perspectives of already mentioned the important work of the Jewish kind of rabbi who really wasn't a rabbi. But that's of course a picture is very well known, almost like the boy Warsaw Ghetto and problematizing that further and seeing kind of what that can contribute not just in the context of what's depicted there, but of course again with the broader perspective of Zule also the aftermath and how it's used pretty much to the present day in some of the locales in which take praise in present day Poland. I mean this stuff is on display, but also of course part of the broader memory politics of the Polish political situation, which of course is also nicely nuanced and complicated. So yes, certainly to end this conversation or to put like photographs front and center, which is not to say of course that they never played a role. Of course they have very prominently in more recent years. But again along the lines of summarizing the debates where we add more impulses and pushing this further and again not too reductionist only in things Holocaust, but.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Much, much broader, I think we see some interesting approaches to the question of memory and photography vis a vis History or historiography with photography. In the book, some of the authors just go along what Thomas just said and think of photography as a way to take back memory, to get back the agency of the people whose documentation was done by others or was not done at all. And Dora Appel's essay that we have in the book is a very good example of that, as she takes it back to her family and just creates a narrative of memory goes through the generations within her family from a few photos. So that's one way to look at it. Noam Gal took it to a more radical way where he thinks that some photographers like Yael Bartana actually used photographs in order to say something much more radical about the loss of memory or the. The inability to anchor memory and to leave the images where they were first created. So she takes a few images of Herzl, she emulates them, placing herself as Herzl. And Noamgal's argument about it is how she tries to undermine what we think we know from the iconic photograph of Herzl. And he does it in a very elegant way. Some authors actually said, no, it is really important to keep the memory as something that we can all relate to, something that shows us that it really happened. We were there before. So Daniel Magalow, Daniel Magalow's article about the documentation of Jewish cemeteries after the Holocaust looks at this effort to effort on people to say, here we take these photos, we put them in photo books in order to show that we were really there, that this is real. And he problematize it and tries to show that once we have this argument, we already create new problems about the nature of memory. What does it mean, how we influence the way it will be remembered through quote, unquote, objective photos, and so on, so forth. So we have different ideas to look at it. And the last example I will give is from Michelle Klein, who looks at photos in albums of portraits that were placed in family albums, which supposedly do not say anything to anyone unless you know the people. You are from the family know the people, but they were taken in the 19th century. So no one knows these people anymore. No one knows the, you know, the nuances of what those people stood for or who they were, and so on, so forth. And she shows that we can recreate the memories that they were supposed to produce in these albums if we look at it carefully. So if you, you do not study memory, you study what was memory supposed to do through these photos.

[Amir Engel]

Interesting. So the history of memory, let me see, let me try to sum up the argument, if I understand correctly and you can say, if it makes sense to you. It seems we usually tend to think about photography and photos and visuals as more accurate historically. Right. We have this tendency to think, oh, this is what happened, we have a picture of this. But you say this is not exactly so. On the other hand, it is also not only a memory, it's not only some kind of subjective ephemeral memory of somebody, but it has a tendency to complicate these categories in general. So if this is correct, is this correct? Is this what you're saying? More or less, yes.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

But the interesting thing is that a photograph is not an objective depiction of reality, but it's an argument about reality. And historians should study this argument.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

Yeah. So I mean, there's of course a long debate within kind of photography.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Right.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I mean, just maybe throwing out like, you know, Bart and Sontag and whatever who problematize these kind of very notions. This of course is not necessarily something that like, you know, you're average historian or PhD student in a PhD program kind of reads in this regard. They should, but not always necessarily kind of happening. So in many ways. So the problematizing of depictions like reality, how captured in written text of photography, to problematize this connection, of course goes very deep in photography and why we are of course want to highlight the importance and push it and hopefully more scholars will again then abstain also in the future, even in surveys, studies, I mean, historians now kind of from simply using it for illustrative purposes and means and whatsoever. That's of course part of the hope. Right? So hope of course too at the very same time, and that's what the book hopefully does too, is to problematize this distinct kind of connection and then propose various ways in which to do so, in which to study it. And again, not just looking at the photograph in isolation, but of course again in the broader context, as everybody in this book does also, like with like, you know, Joachim Schlier kind of revisiting like the much better known photographs by Pizary and Vishnyakanov, for example, and then giving us new ways of looking at and problematizing it.

[Amir Engel]

I stumble across collections of photographs here in Berlin, in flea markets. You often find like shoeboxes filled with hundreds of photographs. And some of them are, I don't know, they're just like family photographs from the 1920s, 30s, 40s. Sometimes you get some somebody in a SS uniform and one of them, you know, or some kind of something that means something historically. Many of them Don't. But they're kind of fascinating in a way, something that you kind of compelled to look through them, you know, and it makes me think these collections. If you could do something interesting. Let me move to the next question. It has to do with the photographers and the photography itself. Photos, we know some of the famous photos. Everybody has like a collection of famous photos in his mind. But you discuss many, many photos and many collections of photography and albums and some photographers that people maybe are more or less aware of. Maybe you can kind of point out one or two photos or albums or collections or photographers that you think are for you, interesting, meaningful, I don't know, supports what you're trying to do with your work that you think people should pay more attention to.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

Overtake it in a minute. But of course also the question of access. Right. So you want to kind of make sure that like our readers can easily access this. And in some cases, of course the silver lining of that God awful kind of pandemic was like that more and more material is digitized. Right. So there's quite a bit, for example at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and some of our scholars use that. But I think an exciting. And again ofa doesn't have to. You don't have to take it, but just to throw the ball kind of into your court. Use like an awkward American kind of sports metaphor there. But I think really this kind of collection, you know, of the Meyer family collection. Right. So in Haifa would be absolutely fascinating. I think it's been at least by scholars like in Europe and also in the States, certainly kind of underused. But you don't have to go there over. You can also pick a different one.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

I'll say something about the Meyer Collection at Haifa University, which is one of the most wonderful private collections I've ever seen with thousands of photos from the 1890s going on to the. To the 1950s taken by at least two generation of wonderful amateur photographers with a great eye for both aesthetics but also interesting moments. And if you look at that, you can learn so much about the. The German Jewish experience during the post emancipation era to the first World War to antisemitism and forced migration and ending in Palestine later Israel still as a kind of minority seeking to get in, so on, so forth. This is wonderful collection, Thomas. Thanks for or bringing it up. Let me say two things. One, when we think of collections that are accessible, there is a politics of what is accessible and how it is accessible. And this politics can be institutional politics can be national politics, but it's not an objective kind of pursue. When you just go to the archive and you find something because it's there. It's there because someone wanted it to be accessible. Someone thought this is important, this is not important. So on. And Mikey Numbach and Jonathan Stafford's article here does a wonderful job by showing how what happens when you get into the archive or when you get into a museum and what can you understand from the collections they have there? So this is one thing I would like to say about what we have in the book. So we have, I think, a few collections that people wrote about in this book, but many more scholars should look at this collection. One of them is the Hermolersky's wonderful set of pictures that he made in Palestine, 1930s, 1940s, that were looked as the prototypical Zionist photographs for a while. And now, as Amos Morris Reich shows, this is much more, let's say this is much messier than that. And he does much more than we thought and also much less than we thought in terms of the designist creator that we see there. So this is really interesting. And of course we have to mention the Jewish photographers who place themselves vis a vis other minorities or outsiders or powerless. The article by Rebecca Grossman, for example, looks at Jewish outcast from Central Europe in the 1930s, going to China and India and Africa and work for humanitarian causes. And this is fascinating because both because they were, you know, outsiders look at outsiders, but also because they chose certain positions that we sometimes would not expect them to, to have as outsider looking out, if you will. And then what Deborah Dash Moore and Michael Berkowitz did in their articles here, looking at Jewish photographers in the US looking at African American in what they would call in their neighborhoods in New York. And again, show them as human beings, but also as part of a political struggle that happens during that time. So again we have different stories, different conflicts, different ideologies coming into this juncture of sets of ideas, of photographs that they left behind that we can learn a lot about the German Jewish experience, obviously about the African American experience in the US but also about the German, the Jewish experience, the American Jewish experience during that time.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

In many ways, of course, and also like, like a new and different way of looking at photographs that we might have already seen or familiar with like Danny Lyons work and the civil rights or black liberation struggles in the States, kind of for example, example as well. And while of course the book was finished and the introduction written of course at this point kind of months or even a couple of years ago in kind of this regard. Right. So I mean, it's striking kind of how if you look at some of the shifts right now, we have a strong push by the current administration in the United States kind of to revisit American history. Even part of the Holocaust Museum is now closed, right. The wall of the US Government like in the Holocaust has to be kind of revisited. Whatsoever in which this is highly relevant, right. In which like it's of silencing, if you wish, of some parts of US History and the book and some distinct reads and ways of looking at like also photography vis a vis African Americans and others still kind of speaks to kind of this like debate is unfolding, which we couldn't quite foresee kind of as we are finishing the project. So it's obviously a question of like, you know, how useful. What's the longevity of a volume whatsoever. But at least as far as this is concerned, I'm fairly optimistic.

[Amir Engel]

Maybe, maybe I can ask you as two historians who've been thinking and talking and analyzing, visualizing photographs kind of in a very serious way, maybe you could say something not exhaustive but kind of an insight into our current status vis a visual images that we get through the Internet, through Twitter, through the social networks, from areas of conflict. Every day we are inundated by pictures from Gaza, from the Ukraine, from the west bank, from. From other places. There was recently a little video that went viral of a pro Palestine demonstrated in Berlin that got hit in the face by a German police officer. I mean, very powerful kind of very small but very powerful image. Is there anything you can tell us about, based on your kind of thinking and perspective on, on where we are now on this issue of visuals, memory, knowledge and understanding.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

That's really the question. I think it's widely accepted, I think among scholars and beyond even pop culture and whatsoever that the visual is highly influential. And of course you see it where. The way it's used or whether. Or misused in so many different ways, especially in. For the Internet that are so widely accessible. And of course we didn't go much into like into film that be a great other volume.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Right.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

So in many ways you know too. But of course like in part like the way in which the volume is intended to again to provide kind of more tools to a broad readership. I didn't mean to exclude undergrads earlier, quite the opposite. I mean I'll assign it in some of my classes. I'll try in 02 and kind of in this regard to again kind of give more tools to problematize. And that's of course a thing. Problematize, problematize, problematize and figure out ways to think through it and why something is placed in certain ways. And that's what I just meant with the longevity. Yes, we didn't talk much about the current war and conflict kind of in Gaza and all of it. But of course number of our scholars already kind of hit it there. I mean this is like all Eldred collection like years in coming. But again, some of the insights there can certainly be used and that's what we hope will also happen.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Yeah, so we talked before a lot about the, the problem of reading photography and that we are still trying to find methodologies that will help us with that. I personally, I think that the methodologies that you, you will read about in, in this book give good answers for that. But then we have a new, a new problem that you don't have with photos that you know from, from 100 years ago or from, you know, 50 years ago. Instead, if we look at, at current visual culture, the excess means that there is lack of curation. So when I look at, at photos from the 1920s, 1930s, even amateur photographs, someone had to make some choices. I'm going to develop this one, I'm going to keep it, I'm going to have it in the album in a certain way and so on and so forth. In current social networks or what I do normally I take, you know, thousands of photos all the time thinking that at some point, you know, I will, I will have to sift through and think what I want and what I don't want. But historians, we'll look at that we'll have a terrible problem to look through what social networks have, what you have in the media, in the visual media and so on, so forth. I think we still have to find ways to deal with that. With the excess of visual imagery. I'm pretty sure that AI tools will help us to do that. I don't think it's so far fetched to think that in a couple of years we'll have very good tools to do basic analysis with abundance of images. But for now I think this book is not for historians of the Gaza conflict. In 100 years. But I think it's a very good introduction to historical photography until digital photography.

[Amir Engel]

Thank you. Maybe before ending, you can tell us just briefly, what are you working on now?

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Well, I have a dream project that I'm still developing, looking at photographs that were made under Nazi occupation in Europe by amateur photographers all over Europe, and trying to reconstruct the way they would document their private life, the environment where they lived, what happens to them during the war, what happens to other people next to them during the war. And try to learn about reality in Nazi occupied Europe through these photos in a new way. Try to have new questions with these photos, have some new answers with these photos. This will be a continuation of the project I talked about about before, of Jewish photography in Nazi Germany, but now I want to take it through all of Europe, so I'm developing that. In the meantime, I'm working with my great friend and colleague Guy Meron, on writing environmental history of German Jews.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

I'm also staying kind of with photography and two projects I'm currently involved in, kind of one is a continuation of one I've been working on for maybe kind of too long at this point. I'm looking at how protest movements, especially kind of on the left in the postwar era, so from the 50s all the way to the 80s and 90s, were appropriating and using and shaping a language, but also a visual one, kind of off genocide. And of course, they are really photographs and photographic images are like of the utmost kind of importance there. And how this is negotiated in transnational spaces between West German and kind of American activists, that's one project and the other one is maybe even more ambitious. It's a global history of the hollow cow. So leaving Europe, right, the area that OFA is now focusing on and looking at aspect too. And there photography, in fact, is also very important in a number of ways. So I'll keep both of us busy those projects for a while, I guess.

[Amir Engel]

Well, I hope not too long so we can get to meet again on this channel and talk about your new books when they're out. Thank you so very much for your time and for taking and speaking with us about rethinking Jewish history and memory through photography. Ofer, thank you so much. And Thomas, thank you again.

[Thomas Peglo Kaplan]

Thank you.

[Ofer Ashkenazi]

Thanks a lot. Thanks.