Participant Info

First Name
Rachel L.
Last Name
Greenblatt
Country
United States
State
MA Massachusetts
Affiliation
Dartmouth College, Brandeis University
Website URL
https://dartmouth.academia.edu/RachelGreenblatt
Keywords
Jewish history, history & memory, collective memory, early modern Europe, early modern Ashkenaz, gender, women writers, cultural history, book history, librarianship
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
Additional email addresses: rgreenblatt@brandeis.edu, rachel.l.greenblatt@dartmouth.edu (the Dartmouth address is checked less often).
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a cultural historian of Jews in early modern central Europe. My book To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague (Stanford University Press, 2014) uses textual and material sources to document the ways in which Jews living in this central, populous community from about 1580 to 1730 recorded their own local past and thought about how posterity would recall them. It was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, among others. It has also been published in Czech translation. I have also written on Jewish processions in  honor of the birth of heirs to the Habsburg throne. I am now working on writing and publication by early modern Jewish women.

As Judaica Librarian at Brandeis University, I am responsible for the library’s leading Judaica collection and especially for supporting students, faculty and staff in its use. I also love teaching adults Jewish history and related topics, and I accept some freelance writing and speaking engagements.

Simultaneously, I serve as Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where I teach one to two courses a a year. In the past, I have taught at Harvard, Wesleyan and St. Anselm College, on topics as diverse as the roles of Jews in American television, museum and display, women and gender in Jewish history and in medieval and early modern Europe. I give public lectures on themes including gender and Judaism, Jewish history and collective memory, and television in American Jewish culture.

Recent Publications

To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague. Stanford University Press, 2014.

“A Jewish Easter Lamb: Cultural Connection and Its Limits in a 1716 Prague Procession.” In Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe, ed. Francesca Bregoli and David Ruderman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 154-70, 275-79.

Media Coverage
https://www.jta.org/2020/07/27/culture/how-did-europes-jews-cope-with-a-17th-century-plague-this-350-year-old-memoir-offers-a-glimpse
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
Eastern Europe, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
Pre-17th century, 17th century, 18th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Gender, Higher Ed, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Religion, Women