Transmitting Jewish History – Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Conversation with Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) was one of the most eminent Jewish historians of the twentieth century. He was the Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization at Harvard University, and from 1980, the Salo W. Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University. His publications include From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto; Haggadah and History; The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah; Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory; and Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. Sylvie Anne Goldberg is associate professor at the Center for Historical Research, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, where she heads the Jewish Studies Program. She is the author of several books, including Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague and Clepsydra: Essay on the Plurality of Time in Judaism. Benjamin Ivry is the author of biographies of Francis Poulenc, Arthur Rimbaud, and Maurice Ravel, as well as a poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen. He has also translated books from the French by André Gide, Jules Verne, Witold Gombrowicz, and Balthus, among others, and has written extensively about culture for numerous media.   

Foreword to the English Edition by Alexander Kaye
Note to the French Edition by Ophra Yerushalmi
Introduction – Sylvie Anne Goldberg
I. Zakhor, From Memory to Reading History
II. Choosing History
III. Back to Childhood
IV. The Path to Cardoso
V. The Melody of History
VI. From Zakhor to Freud
VII. Derrida
VIII. New York: 1939-1945
IX. Who Makes History?: Questions of Interpretation
X. A Jewish Kid from the Bronx at Harvard and Columbia
XI. Professor Yerushalmi
XII. Questions of History and Historiography
XIII. The Collector
XIV. Gershom Scholem
XV. The Ritual Experience
XVI. Truth in History and Its Avatars
XVII. Messianism and Zionism
XVIII. The State of Israel and Messianic Significance
XIX. An American Jew
XX. From Yesterday to Tomorrow
With “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century”
Index