Ignite Your Imagination

As a scholar whose interests are at the crossroads of modern Jewish literature, history and politics, I found that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2004) ignited my imagination.

Slezkine frames his interpretation of modern Jewish history through a reading of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish tales about the misadventures of Tevye the Dairyman and four of his strong-willed daughters, the basis for the musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. Slezkine imagines Tevye’s daughters as symbols of the challenges and opportunities resulting from the Jewish encounter with European nationalism and the seductive promises of an age of secularization, economic and social mobility, and universalist ideologies. 

In Tsaytl, the daughter who marries a poor tailor to continue a traditional life in the shtetl, Slezkine sees the fate of Jews who continued to orient their lives around duty to an inherited tradition without ever benefitting from European culture—only to be murdered by the products of that very same kultur in their own towns during World War II. 

In Chava, the daughter who converts to marry her Ukrainian lover and then returns to her father to beg forgiveness, Slezkine reads the story of Zionist awakening. 

In Bielke, the daughter who moves to America with a husband for whom status is more important than Jewish cultural literacy, Slezkine sees American Jewry as perhaps more socially and economically secure than any previous Jewish diaspora community but possessing a Jewishness based on a shallow interpretation of ethnic difference rather than on the ability to navigate a Jewish text or language. 

A sweeping look at the Jewish 20th century through the lens of Sholem Aleichem’s tales and two murdered Yiddish poets.

Slezkine concludes that we know a great deal about these women because their fates have been the concern of both Jewish collective memory and the way in which we teach Jewish studies. That is, curricula on the Jewish experience in the 20th century typically emphasize the teaching of the Holocaust, Zionism and the State of Israel, and the American immigrant experience, exploring the tensions between memory and creativity that flowed from them. 

Slezkine’s book certainly frustrates readers with its blunt stereotypes, generalizations and one-dimensional readings. But it also sets up a dramatic and necessary intervention in its portrait of Hodel, the daughter who marries a fiery radical and leaves home for Siberia to spread word of revolution. This poses the question: Why do we know more about the mass external Jewish migration to America and to mandatory Palestine than we do about the great internal migration of Jewish youth from hundreds of small towns in Eastern Europe to its big cities, where they willingly divested themselves of their traditional identities in order to build the model Soviet? 

The book that has most impacted both my research and teaching is Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins. This book introduced me to Black women’s studies as a field in its own right and as a discipline that could be undertaken by social scientists. 

When I was introduced to this groundbreaking book—first published in 1990 and now a Routledge classic—I was an undergraduate political science major and philosophy minor with the goal of becoming an attorney. The book literally changed my life. It set me on an inquisitorial course, and since then it has been the book that keeps on giving. When I was an undergraduate, it introduced me to feminism, and Black feminism in particular, and later, when I began my own research as a graduate student, it gave me the foundation for understanding the contours of Black women’s lives as married professionals with children. Finally, this book serves as a manual of sorts for Black women scholars in the academy. 

Collins gives us the tools for centering Black women’s experiences through what she identifies as their standpoint. She shows us that a rich intellectual tradition of and by Black women exists but has remained virtually invisible. She uses the words and voices of Black women intellectuals as early as 1832, when Maria Stewart gave a public lecture in Boston, and continues through the 19th and 20th centuries, chronicling the intellectual work of Anna Julia Cooper, Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde, to name a few. 

Black feminism has been captured in a unique intellectual movement whose voices need to be heard rather than silenced.

Beyond that, Collins explains that Black women’s intellectual tradition is largely unknown even to Black women themselves, because it is easier for dominant groups to rule when there seems to be no independent consciousness of the oppressed. In other words, if it seems as if Black women haven’t been saying anything, then it’s assumed that they must agree with the dominant view. By situating Black women’s experiences, Collins asserts that they are not willing collaborators in their victimization; on the contrary, their everyday experiences in resistance, survival and activism are what drive their intellectual and theoretical work against oppression of all forms. 

Collins further explains how the focus on Black women’s standpoint is important for advancing scholarship in diverse disciplines and theoretical traditions. While she concentrates on her own discipline of sociology and critiques women’s and Black studies, she extends her critique to every discipline, with the understanding that Black women’s perspectives have been silenced throughout. And while she would like all scholars to take up the mantle, she is talking specifically to Black women. 

Luiz Ruffato’s groundbreaking and award-winning Eles eram muitos cavalos (There Were Many Horses) is a singular book that embodies present-day Brazil like nothing else. The book, which debuted in 2001 in Portuguese, was translated into English by Anthony Doyle and published by AmazonCrossingEnglish in 2014. 

To understand the complexities of a continent-size country, why choose a book of fiction that delineates a single day—from predawn to dead of night—in the life of the colossal city of São Paulo and its diverse districts, by way of 69 self-contained fragments? My answer is because of its breathtaking inclusivity and heart-rending portrayal of humanity, featuring migrant laborers, immigrants, consumers and go-getters in hustling survival mode.

One of the defining novels of contemporary Brazilian literature, There Were Many Horses captures life in Brazil to give readers innovative ways to consider society, class, family, poverty and the survival of the human spirit.

At once tough and tender, There Were Many Horsesisn’t an owner’s manual or guidebook to Brazil. It is a challenging book to read (translated into countless languages and analyzed by scholars across the globe, from whom my 2007 transnational edited volume Uma cidade em camadas [A City in Layers] emerged). The book combines hyper-honest, unembellished portraits of Brazil’s socioeconomic strata with sophisticated formal experimentation.

Ruffato is a Brazilian prose writer inspired by poetry, whose favorite world authors include Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, William Faulkner and Joachim Maria Machado de Assis. Ruffato is an avid reader and worldly observer of real life, whose humble origins lend a political edge to his literary mission. He publicly upholds the transforming power of literature in its role as commitment.

The indelible marks humans have made on the natural environment should soon lead to the official naming of a new geologic epoch, appropriately called the Anthropocene (anthropo- is Greek for “human”) Epoch. As an atmospheric chemist, I am acutely aware of many of these marks: the chemical load now being borne by our atmosphere, oceans, land and our own bodies. But some consequences are subtler than the Antarctic ozone hole or calving glaciers; sometimes we only notice when we really look. 

Tristram Stuart does just that as he turns a critical eye to our food system in Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), a book I find both convicting and inspiring. The sheer immensity of our food waste problem is overwhelming, and Waste could easily leave a person feeling powerless to effect changes in behavior. Fortunately, the book ends with hope: a powerful illustration of success in Japan and Korea and a clarion call to action for all of us.

Wasted food is taking a dangerous toll on our global resources, adding to the chemical load burdening our atmosphere, oceans, land and bodies. What can we do about it?

Waste highlights that our food production and usage patterns are untenable now and unsustainable going forward. In the United States we discard or destroy so much food that we must ultimately produce or purchase more than twice the amount we will actually eat—which in itself is more than we need. In order to meet this demand globally, we consume vast expanses of forests, wetlands and grasslands, affecting the release of carbon dioxide and methane, the most prominent greenhouse gases. Our collective diet requires one-and-a-half planets’ worth of resources per year to feed it!

There are many good (and quite readable) books in political science, but I sheepishly admit that my research on women’s political inclusion across the Middle East and North Africa was inspired by much more prosaic, mainstream fare: an article in a glossy issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. 

Looking outside of the confines of academia to pop culture can sometimes be a surprising source of insight for scholarly endeavors.

Back in graduate school, my friend and now colleague Aubrey Westfall gave me a subscription to O for my birthday—a sort of “chin-up, we’ll-get-through-grad-school-in-one-piece” type of gift. Month after month, I looked forward to my semi-regular dose of motivational articles sandwiched in between copious advertising. 

Bozena Welborne is an assistant professor of government.

Gazing at the two protein maps of the biceps brachii, commonly known as the biceps muscle, each with roughly one thousand cobalt blue spots of varying sizes and intensities, causes me to start contemplating the fundamental aspects of life. These constellations hold the keys to understanding skeletal muscle sexual dimorphism, the distinct molecular differences between males and females of a species. But how can such static maps inform the dynamics of the living state? How can they elucidate the interactions inherent within the cells? How can they predict adaptations to change? The answers to these questions shed important light on our understanding of life itself. 

The study of muscle molecular physiology and the nature of its survival mechanisms subsequent to reparable damaging exercise have occupied the work in my lab for decades (for a further description, see this Insight article). Understanding the intricate systems whereby the human body adapts to environmental stressors and repairs itself requires multiple approaches, as well as evolving analytical techniques. Why are our muscles sore 36 hours following an unaccustomed exercise and yet are repaired within a week? 

Two masterpieces of music and literature give us a helpful way to approach the molecular basis of life.

In contemplating this intellectual challenge, two masterpieces have helped inform my studies: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. They approach the dynamic analysis of the musical form known as the fugue, in which a theme is used as the sole source of ideas for an entire work, by exhausting all the possibilities of musical counterpoint and the awesome and multilayered world of the sea, both methodically, yet with personal freedom of execution. They are didactic works that delve into their subjects so deeply that we can marvel at their clarity of exposition, all the while creating ineffable beauty on their journeys to strive to understand the human condition. These two works inspire me to think through analytical possibilities of my scientific research with a similar sense of passion and determination. And it is this passion and determination for scientific inquiry that I seek to inspire in my students.