Lecture & Lunch: Joshua Teplitsky on the Aftermath of Epidemics Among Jews of Early Modern Europe

In connection with an exhibit “COVID Pandemic Five Years On: Remembering and Forgetting”

The spring of 2025 marks five years since the first outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Retrospectives in different forms of media—books, newspaper articles and editorials, radio and podcasts, and conferences and gatherings—all represent different approaches to grappling with the past and thinking about the future. How did people in past times confront epidemics, not as they were happening, but after the fact? What tools did they have and create to commemorate and mourn, to rebuild and renew, and even to plan for the next crisis? In this talk, we will look at examples from Jewish communities and culture in early modern Europe, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. We will explore examples of how media shared memory, ritual, preserved practices, and how Jews understood themselves as poised between past traumas and future necessities.

This talk is connected to a new exhibit at Fordham’s O’Hare Special Collections and Archives, “COVID Pandemic Five Years On: Remembering and Forgetting of Epidemics in History.”

A kosher lunch will be served. Registration is required.

About the Speaker
Joshua Teplitsky is the Joseph Meyerhoff Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History. He studies the history of Jewish life in early modern Central Europe, with an eye both to the particularities of Jewish experience and the wider contexts of Jewish-Christian interaction, minority experience, and what the history of minorities reveals about majority culture. He is the author of Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale, 2019), which explores the history of an early 18th-century Jewish book collector, with an eye to the history of material texts, the history of collecting, and the cultures of learning and power in which his library was formed. The book won the Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

In 2022, he published an edited volume titled Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged Press), with Sharon Liberman Mintz and Warren Klein. Teplitsky is currently at work on a book provisionally titled “Quarantine in the Prague Ghetto: Jews, Christians, and the Plague in Early Modern Europe,” which reconstructs a six-month plague epidemic in the city of Prague in the early 18th century. In April 2020, Teplitsky joined Magda Teter for two conversations in what became a pandemic-era series of webinars about epidemics in Jewish history.