We are delighted to announce the launch of our new website presenting the German-Israeli research project Innovation through Tradition? Approaching Cultural Transformations via Jewish educational media.

In January 2014, a transdisciplinary group of researchers from the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and Tel Aviv University began exploring the highly diverse corpus of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jewish educational media with the aim of enhancing our understanding of the complex and far-reaching processes of sociocultural transformation that commenced in the mid-eighteenth century and exerted a profound influence on central European Jews.
This website contains information on our research project, the researchers involved and their individual sub-projects, and events which will be organised by the research group; we will also publish information about further projects, such as a database on Jewish educational media, which will be developed within this research project.

The project is funded by the German Research Foundation.

On April 16th-19th, 2014 the National Conference of the Popular Culture Association was held in Chicago. Andreas L. Fuchs gave a paper with the title “The Songs I am Dancing: Song, Dance and Identity in Ashkenazi Jewish Culture of 19th Century Europe”. He discussed the oral tradition of Jewish wedding songs, the crucial question of “What (exactly) is Jewish music?”, and ended with the custom of wedding dances as means for cultural identity formation, exemplified by the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.