Oral History and Jewish Life

Ava F. Kahn

Teaching a class titled "Oral History and Jewish Life" at the University of California at Davis in 1998 became a challenge and a singularly exhilarating experience. By the end of the quarter, students were to know major themes in twentieth-century Jewish history, to learn the ethical standards of oral history practitioners, to be able to evaluate oral history testimony, and to develop a sense of when and when not to use oral history methodologies in their research. They would gain many of these skills through planning, researching, conducting, transcribing, editing, and cataloging oral history interviews.	1
Because I had presumed that many students taking a course on "Jewish life" would be Jewish or have a strong interest in Jewish culture, the original assignment was to interview a family member or an older Jewish adult whose experience would be interpreted in the context of the history studied in the class. Although the class was offered as part of the Jewish studies program, it was also listed as a humanities class. Therefore, some of the students registered for the class to fulfill a general education requirement and were not sure of its content. The students were primarily immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries as far-flung as Vietnam and Latvia, including the Philippines, Korea, Israel, India, and Afghanistan. This class makeup was unusual for Davis, but advantageous for the course. Due to the unexpected religious and ethnic variety of the students, I modified the assignment of interviewing someone Jewish, instead asking the students to interview members of their own families, regardless of their ethnicity. As preparation for their projects, I required my students to develop bibliographies useful for understanding the individuals they would interview. Thus there was no need to change the reading assignments. But the scope of the class discussions changed. While centering on American Jewish life, discussions included comparisons with the experiences of people of other nationalities and with the immigrant experience in general.	2
Instead of a research paper, I required each student to complete two one-hour interviews. For those interviews, students wrote proposals, bibliographies, and outlines. They conducted interviews, transcribed portions of them, and prepared fifteen-minute oral presentations that were videotaped. Each week students submitted two-page typed journal entries, including answers to study questions based on readings and paragraphs describing their progress on their oral history projects. Students also conducted practice interviews outside of class with friends and family. Grades were based on written assignments plus an in-class midterm and a take-home final.1	3
The readings provided both background on American Jewish history and examples of differing styles of oral history interviewing, editing, and formatting for publication. The reading assignments illuminated many aspects of recent American Jewish history including immigration, migration, religious practice, ethnic relations, the Holocaust, and assimilation. These themes were represented in From the Old Country, which consists of interviews with Jews and other immigrants; Crossing Over, which contains interviews with Jews who fled Europe between 1938 and 1941; and Witnesses to the Holocaust, which presents interviews with American liberators and European Jewish war and concentration camp survivors. I also assigned a multimedia CD-ROM and a course reader; both included oral history transcripts that were used for discussions of content and form. The only non–oral history book assigned was The American Jewish Experience by Jonathan D. Sarna, which was used to supply background for the other readings. To guide the students in their interviewing, The Tape-Recorded Interview was required.2	. . .