In honor of Jewish Heritage Month (May), this blog will feature special notes on resources provided by the Center for Jewish History and its partners that you can use to discover more about your genealogy, the history of the Jewish communities in your ancestral towns, Jewish engagement with the arts, and aspects of rich traditions surrounding both religious rituals and cultural identities. The resources you’ll…
Alice Davis Menken was “born to privilege in 1870 and [she] married into wealth in 1893,” as Michael D. Feldberg explains in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History. Menken “dedicated her life to helping Jewish women less fortunate than herself" (p. 106).
We can guess from Alice Davis Menken’s personal papers—which live here at the Center for Jewish History in…
Herbst
by Joseph Roth
(Click on the images for enlarged views.)
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The Leo Baeck Institute Archives contains a folder of poetry written by Joseph Roth in the First World War (probably 1917). Today remembered as a writer of fiction, Roth wrote numerous poems as well, especially when he was younger. This is his poem “Herbst” (“Autumn”), which was published. You can see both…
Not a Children’s Song
by Mascha Kaléko
(Click on the above images for enlarged views.)
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Mascha Kaléko was born in Western Galicia, but eventually settled in Berlin during her teenage years. She became involved in the Berlin literary scene and was a regular at the Romanisches Café, a known hangout for artists in Berlin. In 1933, as the environment for Kaléko…