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Jillian Davidson wrote her doctorate at the Jewish Theological Seminary on “A ‘Secular Catastrophe’ in Eastern Europe: The Great War and the Reconstruction of Modern Jewish Memory.” She lectures on the Jewish experience of WWI and teaches in the world languages department at the Horace Mann School.

David E. Fishman is Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

In this essay, David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of antisemitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms.