Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage is an interactive cultural history of Jews in America. It includes both an on-line multimedia archive and a traveling museum installation. The project is being developed under the direction of The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
By relying on our innovative “homegrown history” software, this project enables you to collaborate with scholars in writing Jewish cultural history. When you answer a simple questionnaire about your own history and contribute family photographs and stories, these contributions automatically call up related historical information—texts, archival photographs, movies—that contextualize your own materials. By publishing your own histories through this user-friendly interface, you are able to see the immediate effect of your own digital storytelling on the public record and the way it enriches, complicates or challenges what is already known. By engaging in this dynamic interplay between personal memories and public history, you become involved in historiography.
Thematically, our project explores what successive waves of Jews have contributed to the vibrant diversity of American culture. It focuses on Jewish immigration trajectories and the kinds of identity issues they have spawned, requiring immigrants to negotiate rival allegiances to Judaism and America, to the cities they left behind and the new ones where they settled, and to the kinds of Judaism with which they were affiliated. It also addresses patterns of intermingling with other ethnic communities encountered within these new locales. By focusing on these themes of immigration, identity, and intermarriage that recur in all émigré communities in the USA, the project strives to reach a broad public audience not limited to Jews.
In May 2012, a “pilot” exhibition on California will premiere at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Each exhibition will feature the local region in which it is exhibited while still retaining the national scope of the Jewish experience in the U.S. and networked global connections to other sites where Jews have lived throughout the world.
INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS
Museum Partners
Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley
The Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles
Research Partners
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
The USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life
The USC Center for Religion and Civic Life
The USC School of Cinematic Arts
PROJECT DIRECTORS
Marsha Kinder, Project Director, Exec. Director, The Labyrinth Project, USC
Rosemary Comella, Co-director, Creative Director, The Labyrinth Project, USC
William Deverell, Co-director, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
Francesco Spagnolo, Co-director, Research Director at the Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley
DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY DIRECTORS
Marius Constantin, Designer & Programmer
Scott Mahoy, Interface Designer, The Labyrinth Project, USC
Huy Nguyen, Additional Programming
RESEARCHERS
Rosemary Comella, Researcher, University of Southern California
Meredith Drake Reitan, Researcher, University of Southern California
Ava Kahn, Independent Researcher
Marsha Kinder, Researcher, University of Southern Califonria
Lynn Kronzek, Independent Researcher
Noah Shenker, Researcher, University of Southern California
Frances Spagnolo, Judah L. Magnes Museum, UC Berkeley
Karen Wilson, Researcher, University of California, Los Angeles
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
Victor Aurelio Bautista
Daniel Bydlowski
Renzi Go
Pearle Goh
Kristy H.A. Kang
Lilian Luan
Daniel Rabins
Eugene Soh
Alex Soon Lee Tan
Ran Yu
Ya Zheng
ADVISORY BOARD
Historians and Jewish Studies Scholars
William Deverell, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Hasia R. Diner, Prof. of American Jewish History & Prof. of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Frances Dinkelspiel, Berkeley
Marc Dollinger, San Francisco State College, San Francisco
Ava Kahn, Berkeley
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Moshe Lazar, Comparative Literature, Specialist in Ladino and Sephardic Culture,University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Donald Miller, Director of Center for Religion and Civic Culture, Prof. of Religion, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michael Renov, Assoc. Dean of Cinematic Arts, Specialist in documentary theory and Holocaust studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Fred Rosenbaum, San Francisco
George Sanchez, Professor of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Prof. of American Jewish History in Dept. of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, Brandeis University, Boston
Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University, New Jersey
Kevin Starr, Prof. of History, USC, Former State Librarian of California; Specialist in California History
Bruce Zuckerman, Director of the Casden Institute, Prof. of Religion, Founder of The Inscriptifact On-line Archive on sacred texts and objects, USC
Documentary Filmmakers and Artists
Isaac Artenstein, Award-winning Jewish Chicano, Independent documentary filmmaker, San Diego
Alan Berliner, Independent documentary filmmaker, New School of Social Research, New York
Michelle Citron, Chair, Interdisciplinary Arts Dept. at Columbia College in Wisconsin; Independent Filmmaker
Peter Forgacs, Independent Hungarian Filmmaker, Winner of the 2007 Erasmus Prize, Budapest
Broderick Fox, Occidental College, Los Angeles
Mark Jonathan Harris, School of Cinematic Arts, 3x Oscar winner for best documentary, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
George Legrady, Interactive Media Artist, University of California/Santa Barbara
Lynne Littman, Documentary filmmaker, Hollywood
Ruth Weisberg, Painter and Professor of Fine Arts, University of Southern Califronia, Founder of The Jewish Artists Initiative of Southern California
Museum Curators and Archivists
Stephen Aron, UCLA Assoc. Prof. of History, and Exec. Director for the Study of the American West at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage
Alla Efimova, Chief Curator, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley
Gwen Goodman, CEO and Emeritus Exec. Director of the National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia
Grace Cohen Grossman, Senior Curator, Skirball Cultural Center
Edward Kasinec, New York Public Library, New York
Catherine Quinlan, Dean, USC Libraries, Los Angeles
Marje Schuetze-Coburn, USC Libraries, Specialist in German émigré community in Los Angeles
Francesco Spagnolo, Research Director, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley
Karen Wilson, Research Associate at UCLA Center for Jewish Studies
FUNDING SUPPORT
Casden Institute at the University of Southern California
Friends of Tel Aviv University
Walter and Elise Haas Fund
Stephen O. Lesser
Muriel Mines Family
National Endowment for the Humanities
Righteous Persons Foundation
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
USC Provost's OfficeCONTACT
For more information email: Marsha Kinder at mkinder@usc.edu or Rosemary Comella at comella@usc.edu