Digital Approaches to Teaching the Venice Ghetto as Global Paradigm: The Venice Ghetto Collaboration

• In Event: Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities Workshop

Abstract

The Venice Ghetto Collaboration is an interdisciplinary and mutually supportive working group of humanities scholars that, individually and as a group, develops projects that examine both the specificity of the Venice Ghetto and the symbolic power of ghettos more generally. Our scholarship investigates the history, conditions, physical space, and lived experience of the Venice Ghetto, as well as broader questions about the legacy of the ghetto, how and why the ghetto became a paradigm, and how comparisons have been drawn between compulsory, segregated, and enclosed spaces in discourse, literature, and academic research.

During the 2016-17 academic year, we focused on the creation of a curriculum for undergraduate students that embraces the idea of the “local-in-the-global.” At last year’s AJS Conference, we presented a newly created website (www.veniceghettocollaboration.com) featuring the projects developed for our 2016 workshop in the Venice Ghetto. We also debuted an ever-evolving modular syllabus, “Approaches to Teaching the Ghetto in a Global Context.”

This academic year, we will work to localize the global metaphor of the ghetto. The history and literature of Rust Belt cities have emerged as a new frontier in both the disciplines of urban history and American literature. Scholars have examined how segregation, racial discrimination, and interracial relations played out both in archival and fictional sources. Our Collaboration proposes to further this work by examining the Jewish legacy in the histories and literatures of Cleveland and Pittsburgh. By asking how Jews’ understanding of ghettos and discrimination affected the lived reality and discursive knowledge of ghettos during the twentieth century, we trace the transmission of the term, concept, and symbol of the ghetto from Jewish to Black usage. We will further develop this project using the StoryMaps platform to map historical and fictional sites and events in Cleveland and Pittsburgh where Jews and African Americans engaged in meaning-making around “ghettos.”

The opportunity to continue to present this work at AJS as it evolves over time helps us to gain new partnerships, solicit feedback, and continue the important work of developing classroom tools to teach this important historical moment and the implications of this space.

Authors

• Katharine Gillian Trostel, Ursuline College

• Avigail S Oren, Carnegie Mellon University