Yaniv Feller was our guest DSR Lecture Series speaker in February, when he spoke on “Temporary Exhibitions, Permanent Controversies, and Jewish Museums.” A DSR alumnus and scholar of modern Jewish thought and museum studies, Feller is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida, where he teaches religion and Jewish Studies. His book, The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought, won the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award of the Association for Jewish Studies. With Paul Nahme (another DSR alumnus), Feller edited Covenantal Thinking: Essays on the Philosophy and Theology of David Novak. A former curator at the Jewish Museum Berlin, Feller’s current project is titled Jew in a Box. DSR PhD candidate Julie Sharff, whose interests include transnational Jewish identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spoke with Professor Feller about his work. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you see as the intersection between the study of Jewish thought and museum studies?
I recognize that at first glance, there is no evident connection. It is more tied to my career development. Having gotten a job at the Jewish Museum Berlin while finishing my dissertation, I started taking material culture more seriously. An invitation from Pamela Klassen to present on museums in a conference she organized with Monique Scheer led me to theorize Jewish museums.
Naturally, I tried to draw on my previous knowledge. My work in Jewish philosophy was about how Jews respond to being represented by Christians. This led me to think about how Jewish museums function similarly, which was also helpful in terms of constructing a coherent narrative for the job market!
Later, I thought: if we want to think about Jewish museums and potentially curate them from an emic perspective, then we need Jewish thought and consider questions like: what makes an object sacred? What does it mean to situate stuff in space? What are the philosophical implications of certain concepts we use? It’s a different mode of thought, but I do think it’s a helpful training ground, and the two intersect. Museums shape how people perceive Jews and Judaism. But in an ideal scenario, Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and Jewish thought should also shape the museum’s operations.
In your prescient 2023 monograph, The Jewish Imperial Imagination, you discuss how Jewish ideas of self-conception were shaped by German conceptions of nationalism and empire, as well as by a religious messianic ethos. Since you explore these ideas through the example of Leo Baeck, I am curious to know how his example intervenes in our understanding of Jewish responses to fascism or even of contemporary Zionism.
The book was published about a month after the October 7th attacks in 2023, and that likely shaped some of the reception. My introduction, after all, is titled “Jewish and Colonial Questions.” I didn’t talk about settler colonialism. I was interested in German colonialism. But, that’s not necessarily how people read it. When I started giving book talks, both in academic and in Jewish community settings, I found myself repeatedly asked what Baeck would think about the situation today. Baeck died in 1956 in a completely different world, and I am too much of a historian to give a definitive answer, so I try to address this by presenting his views on Zionism and whether they are still relevant.
First things first, from early on in his career, Baeck did not oppose Zionism. At the turn of the century, among German Jews, especially among liberal rabbis, this is surprising. He was in the minority on that. I think his broader thought explains this position. He was really a big-tent Judaism kind-of-guy. After the Holocaust, he said that the noun Judaism is more important than the adjective qualifying it. So progressive Judaism, Reform Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, Zionism… what matters for him is Judaism.
He never disavows support for Zionism or the state of Israel, but it doesn’t mean he wasn’t critical of actions taken by Jews there. In fact, in 1948, he wrote an op-ed with Albert Einstein for The New York Times, in which they deplored the violence between Jews and Arabs—and Jewish violence explicitly. If you read some of his letters, it seems that his solution was some kind of a Jewish-Arab federation—what we would call binationalism. From this perspective, that’s very much to the left, and obviously, not what came to be. It was a minority position then, and even more marginalized today. Whether one agrees or not, I think Baeck offers us a model for the ability to critique the State of Israel from a clearly caring place, without questioning its right to exist.
Both in terms of public influence and in the way they shape Jewish identity for Jews and non-Jews alike, [Jewish museums] are important.
Building on this idea of critique from a place of care, what do you wish people would take away from your work on museums in today’s political moment?
Because I am in the thick of it, I’m still figuring it out. Talk to me again when the book is done!
On a very basic level, Jewish museums are good places to think about Jews and Judaism. Take the Jewish Museum Berlin, which receives about half a million visitors a year. In a single day, more people are likely to read a label there than they are to ever read anything I would write in an academic book. So, both in terms of public influence and in the way they shape Jewish identity for Jews and non-Jews alike, these institutions are important.
Additionally, there is a connection between Jewish museums and other identity museums. I wrote an article comparing the Jewish Museum of Berlin to the National Museum of the American Indian. We have a lot to learn from one another about the representation of trauma and creating narratives that centre emic voices.
You co-edited Covenantal Thinking, a volume of the work on the work of Professor Emeritus David Novak. Could you share how your experiences at the University of Toronto shaped your professional trajectory?
I cannot think of my professional trajectory without my time at the Department for the Study of Religion. Who knows what would have happened in a different institution? I came here because it was one of the best places in the world, if not the best, to study modern Jewish philosophy.
David Novak, Robert Gibbs, Ken Green, and Willi Goetschel, and the list goes on and on. And that’s just modern Jewish philosophy!
Because it’s such a big department with many amazing scholars, when I started working on museums, I was suddenly able to connect with Pamela Klassen, with whom I am genuinely surprised I’d never taken a class during my time in the department. But she was kind enough to offer her mentorship and support.
Without her encouragement and help, my current project on Jewish museums, tentatively titled Jew in a Box: A Comparative History, would not have happened.
No less important for me was the sense of community. Grad school, especially as an international student, can be a lonely experience, but I was blessed to have a great cohort, which made all the difference.
This does not happen in a vacuum, and the department’s support is crucial in creating a sense of community through shared events and experiences among the graduate students.
