How to Use Wikipedia to Teach Jewish Studies

With 35 million articles, Wikipedia has become the largest encyclopedia in human history. We all, students and teachers alike, use Wikipedia on a regular basis. Yet academia has been slow to respond to this exciting source of knowledge. True, the online encyclopedia can’t replace professional scholarship. But instructors have a lot to gain from using it as a teaching tool

Review of \u3cem\u3eColonialism and the Jews\u3c/em\u3e

A review of the anthology Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel

Review of \u3cem\u3eReligion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya\u3c/em\u3e

A review of Eileen Ryan\u27s Religion as Resistance: Negotiating Authority in Italian Libya

My Good Deed This Year? A Wikipedia Assignment

Wikipedia assignments can double as social justice opportunities, a handy thing for faculty with young kids and any other instructors pressed for time. For nine years now, I’ve been assigning Wiki-editing projects in my History classes. Normally, I have students find a reliable secondary source, summarize it, and incorporate it into a Wikipedia article of their choice. This semester, I made a little tweak: I told students about some of the inequalities on Wikipedia

Translation of Three Jewish Men Are Accused of Sodomy (Rome, 1624)

A translation of Three Jewish Men Are Accused of Sodomy (Rome, 1624) , testimony of captain Jacobus Spellatus. Dr. Klein is responsible for the translation, but did not author the editor\u27s note at the top of the first page.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_books/1035/thumbnail.jp

Review of Levis Sullam, Simon, \u3cem\u3eThe Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy\u3c/em\u3e

A book review of Simon Levis Sullam\u27s The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy

Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism

How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews\u27 experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy\u27s wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy\u27s Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_books/1028/thumbnail.jp

Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses

Instructors of Israeli history or literature, like professors in other areas, complain about students’ use of Wikipedia—and with good reason. Unlike peer-reviewed scholarship, many Wikipedia articles contain information that is both incomplete and wrong. Most instructors will warn their students that relying on Wikipedia is a sure recipe for failing assignments. Yet there is a way to mobilize this giant encyclopedia for pedagogical purposes. When students in Israel Studies classes are assigned to edit Wikipedia articles, they achieve multiple goals: they gain critical reading skills, shape public knowledge about Israel, and engage in active learning. This article explains how to run a Wikipedia-editing assignment, outlines its pedagogical benefits, and highlights challenges involved in editing articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

This Yom Ha’Atzmaut, I’m Talking to My First-Grader About Palestinians

What I struggle with now, however, is talking about Israel with my first-grader. At six years old, my child already knows a lot about Israel, but nothing about Palestinians

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust

This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. To explain how distortionist editors have succeeded in imposing this narrative, despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it, we employ an innovative methodology. We examine 25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases. We complement these with interviews of editors in the field and statistical data gleaned through Wikipedia’s tool suites. This essay contributes to the study of Holocaust memory, revealing the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy. More broadly, we break new ground in the field of the digital humanities, modelling an in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume