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Historians in conversation - Dr. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld

How do historians build their career, what motivates them and how they deal with professional and personal challenges? What shapes their professional path? Dr Michael Green from the Faculty of Philosophy and History welcomes you to his podcast, where he will be inviting interesting guests to explore their stories.

Dr. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld has finished her at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has been an active researcher. While never holding a permanent position in the academia, she became one of the most prominent and respected names in the field of Jewish studies, and in particular of the Sephardic Jews in the Dutch Republic. In this episode, the conversation revolves the topics of combining family life and academic research, writing history as an independent scholar, and motivations to do so. One of her biggest achievements was her book Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews of Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2012), which won the National Jewish Book Award (US) for 2012 in the category of Sephardi Culture. Read also her article  “Masters Maids and Mistresses. Aspects of Domestic Life among the Portuguese Jews in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic”, in Sina Rauschenbach (ed.) Sefardische Perspektiven/Sephardic Perspectives (Leipzig, 2020), 11-40.

Hello and welcome to the 13th episode of my podcast Historians in Conversation. My name is Michal Green and I come from the University of Lodz in Poland. My guest today is Dr. Tirza Levi-Bernfeld, who is a historian of the Jewish people in the early modern Netherlands and Amsterdam more specifically. She has published extensively on the topic and her book Poverty and Welfare is perhaps the most intriguing book that was written about the Sephardi Jewish community in the city of Amsterdam...