Jews, Money, Myth

In this lecture, Professor Zweig explores the difficult and controversial decisions that Jewish leaders and officeholders in Israel and the diaspora had to make before it was possible to even begin the pursuit of economic justice.

Performances of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ provoke strong emotions and heated debates on some of the most fraught questions in Jewish-Christian relations. Join us to watch the acclaimed 2004 cinematic adaptation of the play, directed by Michael Radford and for the panel discussion that follows.

In this lecture Professor Zadoff asks ‘in what ways have these historical experiences influenced Jewish life throughout modernity and up until today?’

Based on the novel of the same title by Jewish writer Hugo Bettauer, this silent film, premiered in 1924, satirises the rising antisemitism in Austrian society in the wake of the First World War. The film ridicules the hollow promises of nationalist utopias and the pernicious nature of antisemitic demagoguery.

This critically acclaimed  musical (Norman Jewison, 1971) is based on stories written by the canonical Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. With wit and exuberence, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, remembered most for the song ‘If I were a rich man’, captures an imagined world of the shtetl.

How can museums best confront the stereotypes that feed antisemitism?  Join our panel to explore the challenges of exhibiting difficult histories and shaping the stories objects tell.

This lecture examines the ways in which Jews across Europe and Asia co-operated in helping the tens of thousands of their co-religionists displaced by the mid-seventeenth century wars in eastern Europe.  A broad economic network coalesced which took money raised in communities as far distant as Amsterdam and channelled it to where it was needed most.

Associations between Jews and money have informed the history of Jewish men and women for millennia and have also given rise to some of the most deeply entrenched Jewish stereotypes. In this workshop we aim to explore the connections – real and imagined – between Jews and money.

In the long history of Jews and business, few phenomena have been more formative than Jewish peddling. In this lecture Hasia Diner explores the contours of this history. She reveals how the practice of peddling changed over centuries, and what its impact has been on the great Jewish migrations out of Europe.

Through such vivid literary characters as Shylock, Fagin, and the notorious Jud Süß, the stereotype of the swarthy, hook-nosed, grasping Jewish moneylender has become a staple of western antisemitic discourse. In this talk Professor Lipton traces the slowly evolving image of Jews in medieval art, depicted first as worldly and materialistic, and, ultimately, dangerous and demonic.