How do people link the past to the present, marking continuity in the face of the fundamental discontinuities of history? A Time to Gather argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another as well as making claims of access to an "authentic" Jewish culture. Indeed, both before the Holocaust and in its aftermath, Jewish leaders around the world felt a shared imperative to muster the forces and resources of Jewish life and culture. It was a "time to gather," a feverish era of collecting and conflict in which archive making was both a response to the ruptures of modernity and a mechanism for communities to express their cultural hegemony. Jason Lustig explores these themes across the arc of the twentieth century by excavating three distinctive archival traditions, that of the Cairo Genizah (and its transfer to Cambridge in the 1890s), folkloristic efforts like those of YIVO, and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (Central or Total Archive of the German Jews) formed in Berlin in 1905. Lustig presents archive-making as an organizing principle of twentieth-century Jewish culture, as a metaphor of great power and broad symbolic meaning with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews' long diasporic history. In this light, creating archives was just as much about the future as it was about the past.

About the Author
Jason Lustig is a Lecturer and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the host and creator of the Jewish History Matters podcast. He was previously a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies and a Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute.

Reviews
A Time to Gather offers a fascinating and highly stimulating account on the centrality and function of the archive in the ruptured 20th century Jewish history. Based on an impressive range of empirical records the book provides epistemological and historical substance to the often acclaimed 'archival turn' in the Humanities. * Elisabeth Gallas, author of A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust *
George Orwell famously wrote that 'he who controls the past controls the future.' Jason Lustig's pathbreaking and deeply researched new study tells the story of how the archives from which we study modern Jewish history were formed by leaders who sought to shape this history following their own nationalist assumptions. Lustig deftly moves from Europe to Israel to America and back again, tracing the competing efforts to build the ultimate 'total archive' and thereby shape the future of the Jews by controlling the relics of its past. There is simply no study like it. * Joshua Shanes, author of Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia *
With incredible depth of research and force of analysis, Lustig draws readers' attention to the stuff-the 'epistemic things'-that allow them to know their pasts. He argues that the process of creating an archive is as much about preserving the past as it is about making a claim on the present and future. Leading the reader across the twentieth century, from Germany to Jerusalem to Cincinnati and New York and, finally, to the cloud, Lustig tells the story of how modern Jews gathered their past to make sense of an era of destruction and tumult. * Lila Corwin Berman, author of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution *
Jason Lustig's seminal new book A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture seeks to document the history of Jewish archiving in the 20th century as a history of community archiving, with all the attendant questions this raises for the relation between archives, power, control, identity and, of course, community. As he notes in the introduction, his book "excavates archives as battlegrounds over control of Jewish culture". * Gerben Zaagsma, Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg *
Archives have a history beyond their contents...Jason Lustig's A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture demonstrates this process in a compelling way. * Julia Schneidawind, Assistant Professor, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, European Journal of Jewish S tudies 17 *
Lustig's book marks an essential contribution to our understanding of what the act of collecting and preserving historical records truly signifies. * Joshua Furman, Journal of Jewish Identities *


Awards
Winner of Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists.



Book Information
ISBN 9780197563526
Author Jason Lustig
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 522g
Dimensions(mm) 165mm * 246mm * 31mm