The Afterlives of Jewish Memory

This paper examines two versions of the legend of Rabbi Amnon of Mainz and the composition of the Unetanneh Tokef liturgical poem: the 13th-century Hebrew text from R. Isaac of Vienna's Or Zarua and a 1602 Old Yiddish variant from the Mayse-Bukh collection. Through comparative analysis, I explore how each narratives employs distinct techniques to ensure the memorability of the poem and its composer. The Hebrew version establishes a foundational martyrdom narrative, while the Yiddish, nearly triple in length, incorporates dialogue, emotional depth, and familial relationships to enhance memorability for lay audiences. Central to both narratives is the graphic depiction of Rabbi Amnon's torture and dismemberment, which serves as a visceral mnemonic device. I argue that the preservation of these gruesome details functions as a literary mechanism ensuring the continued remembrance of Rabbi Amnon and his poem, which remains a centerpiece of Jewish High Holiday services despite its fictional origins.

Judaism has a robust, and well studied, set of rituals for the work of mourning and remembering dead loved ones. Less attention has been paid to the material aspect of these rituals and the objects associated with Jewish memory of the deceased. This paper examines one modern phenomenon of Jewish material memory, particularly in the American context: yahrzeit (death anniversary) plaques that decorate many an American synagogue. These bronze plaques, which are ubiquitous in contemporary American synagogues across all denominations, are notable for their egalitarian aesthetic where all names are displayed similarly. This paper asks about the moral function of these objects in relation to their aesthetic effect. What do they do for the memory of loved ones for American Jews and how do they turn the individual memory of a deceased loved one into a larger communal concern?

This paper analyzes American Jews’ use of burials to control Jews involved in the sex trade, and sex workers’ subsequent rebellion against that control. Previous scholars have highlighted religion’s role in necropolitics, that is the way death is used to control populations. However, their analysis has typically ignored burial sites in favor of other necropolitical practices such as incarceration. In contrast, I turn to NYIBA’s cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens to understand wayward Jews’ response to death subjugation. Methodologically, my analysis also differs from prior studies of Jewish “impure” cemeteries in Argentina and Brazil in my close attention to the NYIBA cemeteries’ spatial layout, inscriptions, and iconography. I do so to reveal how the NYIBA used their cemeteries to memorialize the dead and combat Jewish communal attempts to dictate who could attain eternal life.

What will Holocaust remembrance look like when there are no more living survivors to deliver their accounts first-hand? The USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative is one response to this concern. The project has created a library of holograms of survivors that, with the assistance of artificial intelligence, can participate in “real-time, lifelike conversation.” But what are the implications of a memory that gets preserved artificially and definitively but engaged as though it is not? This paper approaches the hologram as a figure and a genre of Holocaust memory that demands attention to technology and the politics of representation. It advocates for situating these new forms of historical record within enduring conversations about the relationship between memory and history—whether figured as opposing projects, joint forces, or otherwise. With the example, I follow an Arendtian approach to memory to argue that historical representations must be contextualized and open to contingencies.