Professor Natan Meir Answers the 4 Questions

Natan Meir, one-time recipient of an FJC doctoral dissertation fellowship and currently assistant professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, just published his first book: Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859-1914. He sits down with CultureShuk to answer the 4 Questions.

1.  Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up mostly in suburban New Jersey (with a few years in Jerusalem and Montreal thrown in for good measure).  After completing my undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia and a few years living in Washington, D.C., I found my first full-time position teaching at the University of Southampton in the U.K.  My partner and I decided that we want to leave England and it was at that point that I found my current job teaching Jewish Studies at Portland State University. It was my good fortune that an academic position became available in Portland that year, as I have found “the Rose City” a very good match for my interests and temperament.

2.  What has been the most pivotal experience for you in the last five years?

That’s a tough one, but I’d have to go with the half-year that I spent living in Utrecht, Holland in 2005. In addition to being a fabulous opportunity for me to get to know my partner’s home city, extended family, and culture, it also gave me tremendous insight into a very different kind of western society and a very different Jewish sensibility.  The Dutch have created a social compact that embraces – indeed, requires – tolerance, but it’s also a society that places a high value on conforming. It’s a much more civilized place than the U.S., but can feel stifling at times to an American.  Being Jewish there is also a world apart from living as an American Jew: the shadow of the Holocaust looms large, and I would go so far to say that the community is permanently scarred by trauma, which is understandable given its losses (75% of Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis).  We feel the loss in our family; my partner’s grandmother was placed with a Christian family during the war and, for reasons unknown to us, did not return to her family of origin afterwards.  To this day she refuses to speak about her Jewish past.

3.  If you weren’t a scholar, what would you be doing?

I would probably be working in the field of museology. I’m a member of the academic advisory board of the Russian Jewish Museum, which is now under construction in Moscow, and it’s been a fantastic experience. I love translating academic knowledge into a hands-on museum experience for regular folks: it challenges you to make complex historical patterns accessible to people of all backgrounds and to think of new and exciting ways to communicate ideas of history, religion, society, and so on.

4.   Now that you can check ‘publish first book’ off the list, what’s next?

Publish second book! Actually, I have to write it first. Tentatively titled “Marginal Jews,” it will be a social and cultural history of marginalized groups in East European Jewish society – poor widows, orphans, and the physically and mentally disabled – in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I’m currently doing research for the project at YIVO in New York and hope to travel to Eastern Europe next year to work in the archives there.

Be sure to check out Natan’s book, available now!