You Can Love Cities without Hating the Suburban Shopping Mall

I am in Philadelphia for the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians. The meeting is being held at a hotel near the convention center and Reading Terminal Market, in the heart of downtown Philly. Here the buildings are tall, the sidewalks are crowded, and at 8 am this morning commuters poured out of the subway stations. 

My close friend Amanda and I are staying in a neighborhood about a mile away, at the home of my cousins-in-law. It’s on the border between Hawthorne and Queen Village, on a quiet street of row houses just off bustling 8th Street. Within walking distance are hundreds of bars and restaurants and unique local businesses. There is a park a block away, and on our way to the conference this morning we passed many neighbors on their morning rounds with their dogs.

This is the beauty of cities: the density, cosmopolitanism, and options. It’s why I love cities, and study cities, and travel to cities whenever I have a chance. Despite this, there are two suburban institutions that I (controversially) find superior to their urban counterparts: the grocery store, and the mall.

There is something to be said for the limited selection and convenience of a small neighborhood grocery, but suburban grocery stores are cheaper, offer more choices, and the aisles are three carts wide. You never get stuck behind someone trying to choose between pamplemousse or passion fruit La Croix. Yes, you have to drive there, but there is always ample parking. It’s a pleasant experience.

The mall is superior to the urban alternative of shopping at individual, non-contiguous retail locations. It is much more convenient to enter a single, climate-controlled edifice where all of your shopping needs are served. If you need an outfit for an event, or a new suit, you can walk around comparing options until you find stylish, well-fitting pieces in your price point. Then you can find shoes to go with it, eat deliciously shitty Chinese food for lunch, and walk out with a Cinnabon for dessert. It’s all right there! When it’s hot or cold or rainy, you’re protected from the elements. When you need to kill some time, you can window shop and exercise at the same time. If it’s your local mall, you’ll likely run into an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a while—though you could also run into your high school English teacher at Victoria’s Secret. Either way, it’s a quasi-civic space that brings people together. 

I hear your arguments that the mall is a soul-sucking, anonymous, conformist, local-business-killing capitalistic hell hole. But sometimes you need something, and that something needs to be acquired quickly, or you need to try it on first, or you don’t know which store will have it. And that’s when the suburban mall beats urban retail. 

Photo by author at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. March 2019.

Although the topic of this newsletter is light, I have one new and one new-ish essay on the internet this week that tackle weightier subjects. 

The first is The Historian's Craft: Thoughts on Reading and Making History in the Wake of Tree of Life, part of a series on the blog of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review entitled Speaking Justice to Power: Local Pittsburgh Scholars Respond to the Tree of Life Shooting. This is the third of three essays I wrote about the tragedy. The first, on teaching after the shooting, can be found on The Metropole. (The second is currently unavailable).

I also re-published the first essay from my Brisket Patreon project, The Pundit vs. The Public Intellectual, on my personal blog. Throughout the coming year I will be making these essays available, without a paywall, on my blog. I hope you find them thought-provoking reading!

The Pundit vs. The Public Intellectual

One year ago, I launched a writing project on Patreon called Brisket. It was a home for essays I was writing that needed to be written “low and slow.” I recently sunset Brisket, and will be sharing the essays here on my blog throughout the coming months. This was the inaugural piece, published in April 2018.

I’ll begin with a story. In February of 2017, I was finishing a dissertation about the history of Jewish Community Centers in the United States. Also in February of 2017, Jewish Community Centers in the United States began receiving phoned-in bomb threats on a weekly, then a daily, basis. Local papers from San Francisco to Nashville to St. Paul to New York ran articles detailing the events of those frightening days: a call received, a Center evacuated, police summoned, the building searched, an all-clear, and a politician quoted condemning anti-Semitism and lauding their community for its tolerance. 

It was the perfect opportunity to write an op-ed. To the New York Times and Washington Post I pitched the question: Why was the perpetrator targeting JCCs and not synagogues? I argued that it was because the Jewish Community Center, unlike synagogues, served both Jews and non-Jews. As a pluralistic space, it represented the fullest threat of intermixing between white Christian Americans and the Other—an affront to the “alt-right” white nationalist groups that I assumed were perpetrating the calls.

The Grey Lady passed, as did the Post, and so did the Jewish Forward and some other regional newspapers. The online op-ed page of the Nashville Tennessean finally accepted it, but the editor published it almost a month after I submitted my final draft. By the time it appeared online, in late March, the facts of the story had fundamentally changed. A Jewish teenager in Israel, not an American white nationalist, had been arrested and charged with perpetrating the bomb threats. And now my name appeared above an untimely, outdated argument that made no sense but would nonetheless live forever on the internet.

Understandably, the experience left me with a sour taste in my mouth. No one could blame me for assuming that the threat was domestic, a product of the hatred that the Republican presidential candidate intentionally stirred up during the 2016 campaign. Moreover, the paper should have killed the op-ed rather than publish inaccuracies. But it led me to realize that I had unwittingly engaged in punditry.

When we think of pundits, it is predominantly television personalities who come to mind. Whether Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on the right or Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow on the left, we know that they are filtering their news analysis through a sieve of moral values and political positions. This behavior, however, is not limited to the studios of Fox News and MSNBC, and many average folks comment on current events during meetings at work or around the dinner table. To be a pundit, as I see it, is simply to speculate, extrapolate, and theorize about present events in the news based on personal experience and expertise. That’s where my op-ed went wrong. I took an activist stance in defense of JCCs and argued that democratic pluralism offended my assumed perpetrator, rather than asking, “how can the history of the JCC movement help us understand why it might be targeted?” I offered an interpretation of a current event and argued why I believed it to be true. That was not necessarily a bad thing, and it could have provided a useful service to the audience if the story had not ended with a third-act plot twist. But had I taken the latter approach I would have done the work of an educator, foregrounding the context and not  my own (incorrect) analysis.

* * *

As of late, it has become fashionable to lament the death of the public intellectual—writers and commentators like Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley Jr., Norman Mailer, and Christopher Hitchens—who used current events and trends as a launching point to discuss the larger questions of the human condition. First of all, this is argle-bargle. White, predominantly male philosophers are still given platforms from which they can monologue their ideas at the masses, though I believe that the era of their supremacy has, mercifully, passed. The fragmentation of the media and publishing industries and the declining market share of the legacy outlets has allowed new, diverse voices—women, persons of color, LGBTQIA individuals, immigrants, and religious minorities, among others—to find audiences interested in their ideas and arguments. Moreover, plenty of academics contribute op-eds, offer public lectures, serve on museum advisory boards, and even write New York Times bestselling romance-adventure series steeped in scholarly research.

“I want to make it clear that I am not saying that in order to write well, or think well, it is necessary to become unavailable to others, or to become a devouring ego. This has become the myth of the masculine artist and thinker; and I do not accept it.”

— Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 1971

Second of all, this narrative of decline is a response to the rise of pundits like Bill O’Reilly, who serves his political agenda with a small side of purported academic expertise—the cable equivalent to being able to call macaroni and cheese healthy when you mix in a cup of frozen peas. O’Reilly is  an egregious example of this phenomenon, but I think that the line between punditry and public intellectualism is not clear cut. In fact, according to the dictionary there is not much of a difference. A pundit is defined as an expert called on to share his opinion with the public. The term apparently derives from the Sanskrit word pandita, or learned man. And isn’t a public intellectual the epitomal pandita? 

The temptation might be to call those with PhDs the intellectuals and label everyone else as pundits, but plenty of PhDs engage in punditry and plenty of public intellectuals don’t have PhDs. This also excludes artists, musicians, and novelists like Ai Weiwei, Beyoncé, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie whose works regularly critique racism, gender inequity, and governmental and social neglect of vulnerable citizens. The temptation is even stronger to assume that these are static categories rather than descriptors of behavior. I want to suggest that we forego labeling individuals as one or the other, and instead rethink “punditry” and “public intellectualism” as behaviors or approaches. To act as a public intellectual is to share ideas and arguments inspired by the present moment that provide the audience with context, helping individuals to better analyze and understand current events themselves. This is the work of the intellectual: to teach and inform and ask critical questions. It is not to advocate, it is to educate.

A public intellectual is someone whose opinions help to set the moral and aesthetic standards of her time; she draws fault lines, explains the stakes of present-day conflicts, interrogates collective intuitions. But more specifically — and more strangely — a public intellectual is someone who articulates alliances between seemingly disparate cultural and political opinions. It’s not self-evident that one’s stances on, say, abortion and what counts as a good movie should align, but they do, remarkably, again and again. To believe in enough of these correlations, and to convince others that you are right, is the role of the public intellectual. It is to possess Susan Sontag’s definition of intelligence as “a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

— Alice Gregory, “Is it still possible to be a Public Intellectual?,” New York Times, November 24, 2015

This is righteous work, but punditry can also be righteous. Sometimes the best approach is to take a strong, unequivocal stand for what you believe in, even when your information is incomplete and you are forced into the realm of speculation and hypothesis. It’s a mistake to see public intellectualism as the only virtuous and high-minded contribution to public discourse. 

There is a particular value to acting as a public intellectual, however, and that is to model informed citizenship and mold an informed citizenry. Recently a friend remarked to me that she only hears citizenship discussed in terms of passports and immigration these days, not in reference to voting and civic participation. Her point reminded me of the hundreds of pages of archival sources, written in the 1940s, that I read as part of my dissertation research. The frequent mentions of democracy and citizenship are noticeable, in contrast to their relative absence today, and signal that people valued these concepts (even if they could not agree on their meaning). Indeed, even an institution as specialized and exceptional as Jewish Community Centers claimed in the 1940s that their purpose was to promote “the development of Judaism and good citizenship” in their members.

Of course, this was during a period of war that pitted social democracy against authoritarian fascism; Americans have understandably become more jaded about democratic participation in the intervening years as political leadership ignored the will of the people and agreed to wage the Vietnam War, the Wars on Terror, and neoliberal capitalism’s war on the middle class. I cannot fault Americans for believing that there is little benefit to being an informed voter, when they have watched their elected representatives repeatedly do the bidding of moneyed interests rather than acting in their constituents’ best interests, and I cannot fault Americans for replicating the self-serving individualism modeled by those who wield their power over us. But the truth is we are all intermeshed and that our decisions all affect each other, and that the collective still matters, and that this is what humanistic and social science research bear out: none of us exist in a vacuum. Scientists have even found evidence of trees communicating with one another through networks of fungi. As citizens of a shared collective, a democratically governed republic, the onus rests on us to come together and make smart decisions. 

So as a historian acting as a public intellectual, my role is to tell stories that show how decisions have cascading effects on others, and to explain how and why people made those decisions. As a historian acting as a pundit, I may even justify certain ideas and call for certain actions. The lesson from my unsavory op-ed is that we must make conscious choices about when and why to favor one approach over the other, and, if choosing punditry, to humbly admit when we are speculating or theorizing about present events in service of our interpretations and analysis.    

My Week of Known Knowns and Known Unknowns

“The more you learn,
the more you know you don’t know!!”

I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement when I read this line on Tuesday morning. It was written in response to a question I asked a fellow historian in her Member of the Week post on The Metropole⁠. One of my responsibilities as co-editor of the Urban History Association’s blog is to run the Member of the Week series. I send emails asking fellow urbanists to respond to a set of canned questions that apply to almost everyone, but I also write one personalized question for each member. This week I featured a PhD who left an architectural preservation consulting firm to start a whole-animal butchery business with her husband. “The more you learn, the more you know you don’t know” was her immediate reaction when I asked her what parallels she sees between academia and entrepreneurship. 

My week has been defined by this uncomfortable tension between knowing and the unknown. Two weeks ago I began teaching a mini-course at Carnegie Mellon on the evolution of “the ghetto” from Venice in 1516 up to the segregated black neighborhoods of present-day American cities. The first four class sessions are focused on Jews in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and the rest of the course focuses on black Americans in the twentieth century. There are a few Jewish students in the class, but the majority are not, and so I have spent a lot of time explaining everything from the definition of “a Jew” to the diaspora to the distinction between “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardi.” On Wednesday night I broke down the differences between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, and described why tensions ran high between the established German Jewish community that immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. Standing up at the front of the room, in the role of professor and speaking as a Jew, for most of my students I am their foremost authority on am Yisrael, the Jewish people.

And then…. I go home, and return to my real life and the recognition of how little I know. On Twitter this past weekend I noticed a stream of tweets directed at a non-Jewish woman who described herself as a shiksa and expressed a desire to “rage bake” Trumpentashen in a show of interfaith solidarity and political resistance.⁠ I thought her tweet was fine, and didn’t blink twice at either her use of shiksaor baking hamentaschen. I appreciated the interest in our tradition! As I read through the replies, however, I learned about the origins of this derogatory term for non-Jews—⁠and how hurtful it is for converts to Judaism, in particular.⁠ And I realized that other Jews on Twitter felt like she was appropriating Jewish culture.

It prompted me to think about the overlaps in the venn diagram between myself and other American Jews. I grew up in a smaller city with a small Jewish community. I was one of only a handful of Jews in my high school. Back then I would burst with pride and happiness at any expression of interest in Jews and Judaism from my peers, because the norm was being invited to church or overlooked. My senior prom was scheduled for the first night of Passover, forcing Jewish students to choose between attending seder or prom. That one of my peers would think to make hamentaschen would have thrilled me, not felt like appropriation. 

And then yesterday on Hey Alma (which, by the way, I can’t recommend more highly) I read an article about Christian seders⁠. I completely understand the argument that this is appropriation, but I also cannot tell you the number of times that I have been able to connect with non-Jews because their experience at their church seder familiarized them with Jewish traditions. I have hosted non-Jews at my own seders here in Pittsburgh who felt more comfortable joining in an interfaith celebration because they had a basic familiarity with how the meal would go. Do I think that this ultimately justifies the practice? Probably not. But I also don’t find myself mad about it.

Where I do find myself is stuck in the knowing/unknowning murk. I know enough to teach my non-Jewish students about my identity, religion, and culture, and I know enough to know how much I don’t know about Jews, Judaism, or Jewish culture. I think this is a point that often gets lost in our contemporary debates about identity politics. Many members of identity groups are still learning the contours of their histories and cultures. Tweets and articles like the ones I read this week are informative and important, but also speak on behalf of the entire Jewish community. Speaking for myself, I find this behavior alienating—even when it’s educational and in our own defense.

In addition to shouting out Hey Alma, which even some of my non-Jewish millennial girlfriends enjoy reading,  I want to recommend a few other things I've been enjoying on the internet lately.

I love watching @julierosealex do her bold, colorful eye makeup looks on Instagram Live. 

I'm obsessed with the podcast Erin and Aliee Hate Everything, particularly their feminist/queer hot takes on politics and pop culture. 

Apps are not really the internet, but we do get them from the internet, ergo I include Woody Puzzle--my current favorite mind-numbing game. 

Reading The Historian's Craft in the Age of Trump

I wrote this essay in the summer of 2016, and spent the ensuing year revising it. Yet I never hit publish. Partly, I felt (and feel) like an imposter; neither Bloch’s work nor WWII are within the purview of my own historical research. Additionally, I’m not sure I entirely agree with my conclusions about the role historians must play in this current moment.

However, I just read the following piece (“The Medievalist Who Fought Nazis with History”) on Forbes.com, and I decided to share this because I do believe that Bloch was telling us more than “the point of history [is] to have something to say about the present.” So I offer my own thoughts for debate.

Recently, I found myself reaching for my well-worn copy of Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, a 200-page meditation on the meaning and value of history and a primer on how to do it well. The book has a tragic backstory. Marc Bloch was a French Jewish historian who was well known and respected for his scholarship on medieval and early-modern French feudal society. After Nazi troops invaded France in 1940, Bloch went underground and began to work on two manuscripts. He wrote the first, Strange Defeat, during the summer of 1940 to chronicle how and why France failed to rout the German invasion. Bloch then began writing The Historian's Craft. In late 1942, while working on the manuscript, he became active in the French Resistance. Vichy police eventually captured him in March of 1944 and he was turned over to the Gestapo for interrogation. He was tortured, imprisoned, and then murdered by a firing squad in June 1944. Bloch's colleague, historian Lucien Febvre, took up the task after the war of assembling the unfinished text into a draft for publication. 

Why did Bloch choose to write a book on historiography and methods, of all possible topics, while a war raged around him? The introduction to The Historian’s Craft provides some indication of his motives. Bloch wrote that because Western civilization “has always been extremely attentive to its past,” it was only natural that “whenever our exacting Western society, in the continuing crisis of growth, begins to doubt itself, it asks itself whether it has done well in trying to learn from the past, and whether it has learned rightly.” [i]

The Historian's Craft thus begins with a quote from Bloch's son, who as a young boy asked of his father, "Tell me, Daddy. What is the use of history?" Bloch explained that buried in this simple question posed by his child lay a deeper question, "no less that of the legitimacy of history.” [ii] From the outset, then, Bloch devoted The Historian's Craft to explaining the "usefulness" of history as an intellectual discipline devoted to understanding human lives. Bloch emphasized that “useful” history portrays people, events, and decisions in the past as complex and dynamic, the product of coincidences and contradictions just as often as of logical choices. 

Bloch emphasized, however, that "this question of use must always come second in the order of things, for, to act reasonably, it is first necessary to understand.” [iii] He believed that explanation was paramount—interpretation and judgment were by necessity secondary. "If the judgment only followed the explanation,” he wrote, “the reader could simply skip it. Unfortunately the habit of passing judgments leads to a loss of taste for explanations.” In the context in which Bloch was writing, when the “loss of taste for explanations” had allowed European fascists to persecute Jews and other minorities whom history had judged unfavorably, Bloch’s appeal was not for objectivity. Rather, he desired for historians to write history that was so rich and penetrating that politicians could not easily flatten it for their use as evidence of a group’s defectiveness or as a justification for action against a group. Indeed, Bloch continued, “When the passions of the past blend with the prejudices of the present, human reality is reduced to a picture in black and white.”[iv]

Bloch thus concluded the introduction to The Historian’s Craft by describing it as “the memorandum of a craftsman who has always liked to reflect over his daily task.” [v] Indeed, “reflective” perfectly describes the book. It is quiet and wise. In a time of chaos, Bloch bored down to examine the nature of history and the essential mechanics of historical research. And yet by focusing on the foundations, Bloch also challenged historians to think more broadly about the judgments they built atop it. 

Are historians to blame for the ease with which politicians flatten history? We must ask ourselves how and why history is so easily dismantled and rewritten by politicians, while our scholarship is dismissed. Have our attempts to prove our contemporary relevance led us to pass too many judgments and ironically led us to undermine our own legitimacy? 

If so, the consequent question is not whether or not to be an activist historian. I still believe the answer to that question is yes. The question is how we can be activist historians without cutting our legs out from underneath us. Bloch would be the last person to say that this means ignoring the needs and interests of the present. Rather, he urged historians to be more understanding. “Even in action,” he wrote, “we are far too prone to judge. ... A little more understanding of people would be necessary merely for guidance, in the conflicts which are unavoidable; all the more to prevent them while there is yet time.” [vi]

I think there is another reason, however, that Bloch wrote this book in the midst of the war, and it’s for the same reason that I turned to his book in the midst of this political moment. The rigorous evaluation of methodology grounds the historian in the present without effacing the infinitude of history and the constant evolution of historiography. There is an inertia created when these contradictory forces are balanced against one another, providing a moment for the scholar to pause, catch their breath, and “ask himself with a sudden qualm whether he has spent his life wisely?” [vii]

These moments of inertia are when it’s most tempting to assert our usefulness by putting judgment before explanation. Bloch urges us to look inwards at our own methodological practices. Not because it will challenge the new regime, or instantly make American society more empathetic, but because it is a balance against the loud, the chaotic. It’s a forceful assertion of the importance of reflection and humility. 

[i]Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 4-6.

[ii]Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 3-4.

[iii]Ibid., 11.

[iv]Ibid., 140.


[v]Ibid., 19.

[vi]Ibid., 143-4.

[vii]Ibid., 4.

My Smash + Grab Research Trip to New Orleans

Last week I had the pleasure, for the first time in months, of spending a day in the archives. With the financial support of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, I was able to travel to New Orleans and conduct research Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection.

I prepared for my visit using the DEVONthink for Historians Smash and Grab Checklist, a template that Ada and I designed and included in Super User guide (we also have a Low and Slow Checklist for longer-term archival visits). We created these checklists because our philosophy is that database maintenance is as important as database mining. It’s like a car—you can’t drive it if you don’t change the oil regularly.

The Day Before

I began by creating a new folder for the Tulane Louisiana Research Collection. Withinn that folder I created a new Smash and Grab Checklist (by clicking Actions > New from Template) and reviewed the three tasks listed under “Before the Archive.”

Per step one, I created a new plain text file within the same folder and labeled it “Archival Notes LaRC Tulane September 27 2018.” I added contact information for the archivists I had corresponded with, the address of the archive, and then listed the collections, boxes, and folders I planned to view during my visit. And then I headed for the airport!

The Day Of

I woke up early so I would have time to double-check that my database, scanner app, and walking directions to the archive were set and that I was ready to go.

I arrived at the archive a few minutes after it opened, delayed by a deluge of rain that slowed my pace. By the time I reached Tulane I was soaked! But between 10:30 AM and 3 PM, I diligently combed through boxes and folders.

As instructed in the “In the Archive” section of the checklist, I kept a dutiful record of the materials I viewed. In my archival notes, I wrote down the contents of each folder (in the aggregate, unless particular documents were of interest) and indicated if I had scanned a particular document.

I used the CamScanner app to create PDFs of each document. I like CamScanner because it has a batch feature that allows you to capture a multi-page document in one PDF (other apps might do this as well, but this was the first one I found). From the app, I transfered the PDFs to my laptop via email. This could also be done with a cloud storage service.

Before I left, I downloaded and opened each file to check that the PDF was readable and complete. When you can’t necessarily get back to an archive, it’s essential to do the job right the first time. It’s hard when you’re mentally drained and your eyes are itchy and tired and all you want is to go eat a big lunch and nurse a beer. But I forced myself to do it!

After the Archive

My first post-archive task, per the checklist, was to transfer all of the PDFs into the database and move them into their appropriate folders. I ended up only scanning 10 documents, and so I had time to do this before the archive closed. With so few documents, I decided that box and folder sub-folders were not necessary and I simply stored the documents by collection.

After a few days of enjoying the Big Easy, I sat down to finish the checklist. I added tags to each document, which varied; I did tag all with the year they were written and “New Orleans” so that I could easily aggregate all my documents from the Crescent City regardless of which archive they I found them in. Once the document was tagged I created a SuperAnnotation and filled in the citation information. The final step was to label both the document and SuperAnnotation with the red dot, which I’ve assigned to mean “To Do”—it’s a reminder to come back and take notes about the document’s contents.

Conclusion

The Smash and Grab Checklist kept me organized on this whirlwind research trip by spreading out the work across three days. It kept me accountable and on-track with my database maintenance, and relieved the decision fatigue that often sets in during work travel. I just did what the steps instructed, and when I finished all of my new documents were in my database, tagged and together with their citation information. On past trips this has not always been the case! I feel like I’ve earned my Super User bona fides.

If this nine-point, step-by-step checklist seems like it could be useful to you during your archival trips, become a DEVONthink for Historians Super User. The guide includes 100 minutes of video lessons, the SuperAnnotation template, and a script that transfers your citation information to Bookends, a reference management software.